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.

John Belshaw's profile page

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

This book revisits BC’s history from pre-colonial times to the present from the perspective of population. By using a demographic lens, Belshaw analyzes the overall patterns and causes of population change. He demonstrates how many early surveys of the subject were biased and racist reflections of the newcomers and settlers for example, not including data related to Aboriginal inhabitants. Chapters most pertinent to school curricula are those describing Aboriginal population before European contacts, changes resulting from contact, the role of immigration during the building of the CPR and the Gold Rush eras, as well as racist policies and events. This historical demographic analyzes data related to sex ratios, nuptiality, fertility, immigration, urbanization, depopulation and mortality in BC.