Captain James Cook first made contact with the area now known as British Columbia in 1778. The colonists who followed soon realized they needed a written history, both to justify their dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and to formulate an identity for a new settler society. Writing British Columbia History traces how Euro-Canadian historians took up this task, and struggled with the newness of colonial society and overlapping ties to the British Empire, the United States, and Canada. This exploration of the role of history writing in colonialism and nation building will appeal to anyone interested in the history of British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and history writing in Canada.

Chad Reimer has previously published four books of BC history, including The Trials of Albert Stroebel: Love, Murder and Justice at the End of the Frontier, and Before We Lost the Lake: A Natural and Human History of Sumas Valley, which received an honourable mention in the BC Historical Federation’s Historical Writing Awards. He holds a BA in Honours History from the University of BC, along with an MA and PhD in History from York University. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and now lives in Williams Lake, BC.

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Writing British Columbia History, 1784-1958

Captain James Cook first made contact with the area known as British Columbia in 1778. Colonists that followed needed a written history to provide a sense of identity, belonging and legitimacy to the new society forming there, and to justify their deposition of Aboriginal peoples. This book explores how a new society goes about writing its history. Reimer traces five generations of BC historians and shows how they approached the task, and how BC historical writing was part of a larger imperial process. Historians presented the geography, and the three pulls, American, British and Canadian to define BC as part of a global British Empire. British Columbians were depicted overcoming nature in order to wrestle wealth from it. Reimer stresses that these historians essentially overlooked both Asian and Aboriginal populations, ultimately contributing to maintaining minority rule of the Anglo male elite that prevailed through the 20th century.