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.

University College of the Cariboo, British Columbia

John D. Belshaw's profile page

"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