Description

Becoming British Columbia

A Population History of British Columbia

John Douglas Belshaw

  • Published: July 2009
  • Subject Listing: Geography, Canadian History
  • Bibliographic information: 320 pp., 6 x 9 in.
  • Territorial rights: U.S. rights only
  • Distributed for: UBC Press
  • Contents

In the 240 years from contact to the present, British Columbia's population has experienced transformations of a kind and magnitude witnessed nowhere else in North America. The introduction of exotic diseases changed the human landscape almost overnight, as did gold rushes, industrialization, two world wars, a baby boom, late twentieth-century immigration from Asia, and a grey wave.

Becoming British Columbia is the first comprehensive, demographic history of this province. Investigating critical moments in the demographic record and linking demographic patterns to larger social and political questions, it shows how biology, politics, and history conspire with sex, death, and migration to create a particular kind of society. John Belshaw overturns the widespread tendency to associate population growth with progress by examining how the province's Aboriginal population of as much as half a million was reduced by disease to fewer than 30,000 people in less than a century. He reveals that the province has a long tradition of thinking and acting vigorously in ways meant to control and shape biological communities of humans, and suggests that imperialism, race, class, and gender have historically situated population issues at the centre of public consciousness in British Columbia.

Becoming British Columbia demystifies demographics in an accessible yet scholarly and provocative way. It will appeal to scholars and students in history, sociology, geography, and Canadian Studies, as well as to general readers interested in BC history.
John Douglas Belshaw, formerly professor of history at Thompson Rivers University, is now Associate Vice-President of Education at North Island College, Vancouver Island.

"Becoming British Columbia demonstrates the significance of demographic knowledge to our understanding of the province's history and its historiography. It provides another lens through which to view the history of the province, and one that has the potential to change the way we think about British Columbia's past." - Ruth Sandwell, author of Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia
Contents
Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Acronyms

1 Cradle to Grave: An Introduction

2 Weddings, Funerals, Anything: The British Columbian Demographic Narrative

3 The West We Have Lost: First Nations Depopulation

4 Girl Meets Boys: Sex Ratios and Nuptiality

5 Ahead By A Century: Fertility

6 Strangers in Paradise: Immigration and the Experience of Diversity

7 The Mourning After: Mortality

8 The British Columbia Clearances: Some Conclusions

Appendices
A Leading Settlements/Towns/Cities, BC, 1871-1951
B Total Population, BC, 1867-2006
C Age and Sex Distributions, BC, 1891-2001
D Infant Mortality Rates, BC, 1922-2002

Notes
Suggested Reading
Index
Reviews