Writing British Columbia History, 1784-1958

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 shows how Euro-Canadian historians took up this task, and struggled with the newness of colonial society and overlapping alliances to the British Empire, the United States, and Canada. In explorers’ accounts, promotional literature, “pioneer” histories, and academic studies, they eased these tensions by defining British Columbia as part of a global British Empire, incorporating it into an expanding Anglo-Saxon civilization, and writing it into the empire of history itself.

This sweeping study of the role of history writing in colonialism and nation building will appeal to anyone interested in British Columbia history, the history of the Pacific Northwest, or history writing in Canada.