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Business & Economics Labor

Colonization and Community

The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class

by (author) John Douglas Belshaw

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2004
Category
Labor, General, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780773524033
    Publish Date
    Apr 2004
    List Price
    $37.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

In Colonization and Community John Belshaw takes a new look at British Columbia's first working class, the men, women, and children beneath and beyond the pit-head. Beginning with an exploration of emigrant expectations and ambitions, he investigates working conditions, household wages, racism, industrial organization, gender, schooling, leisure, community building, and the fluid identity of the British mining colony, the archetypal west coast proletariat. By connecting the story of Vancouver Island to the larger story of Victorian industrialization, he delineates what was distinctive and what was common about the lot of the settler society. Belshaw breaks new ground, challenging the easy assumptions of transferred British political traditions, analyzing the colonial at the household level, and revealing the emergent communities of Vancouver Island as the cradle of British Columbian working-class culture.

About the author

Contributor Notes

John Douglas Belshaw is on faculty at Thompson Rivers University - Open Learning, a consultant to the post-secondary sector, and the author of several books on BC history.

Editorial Reviews

"A substantive piece of original research, undertaken in a systematic fashion. Colonization and Community makes a distinctive contribution to migration studies as well as to the thin literature on ethnic identity and class formation, which he examines using a great deal of innovative quantitative and qualitative methodology." Delphin Muise, Department of History, Carleton University