Becoming British Columbia is the first comprehensive, demographic history of British Columbia. Investigating critical moments in the demographic record and linking demographic patterns to larger social and political questions, it shows how biology, politics, and history conspired with sex, death, and migration to create a particular kind of society. John Belshaw overturns the widespread tendency to associate population growth with progress. 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.

Diane Purvey is an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Human, Social and Educational Development at Thompson Rivers Univeristy in Kamloops. She is the co-editor of Child and Family Welfare in British Columbia: A History (Detselig Press) and co-author of Private Grief, Public Mourning: The Rise of the Roadside Shrine in British Columbia (Anvil). She was born and raised in Vancouver.

John Belshaw is the Dean of Social Sciences & Management at Langara College. He is the author of Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (UBC Press) and Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class, 1848&150;1900 (McGill-Queen's University Press), and co-author of Private Grief, Public Mourning: The Rise of the Roadside Shrine in British Columbia (Anvil). He is a second-generation Vancouverite.

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The evidence presented…forces us to consider the important conclusion that British Columbia throughout its history has been “at the extremes of western world demographic trends.” Becoming British Columbia deserves a wide readership.

Labour/Le Travail, 65

Becoming British Columbia: A Population History