On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1971 by Adele Perry (review)

humanities 435 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Hutton. In particular, Joseph-Charles Taché figures prominently in this study as the >founding father of Canadian statistics.= State servant, disciplined administrator, nationalist, literary figure, Taché >established clear observational protocols that lodged his politics in the deep structures of the census= so that this first >scientific= census of 1871 was, in fact, >a fundamentalist Catholic ethnic-national project.= Indeed, it was to be a >monument= that identified and celebrated the past, configured memory and tradition, and tied people to a vision of their present and future. As Curtis puts it, Taché=s 1871 census volumes were essentially monuments erected in the public space, and >consecrate a particular vision of history and memory.= Not content with all of this, Curtis seduces this reviewer-cum-geographer with his insightful exposition of the relationship of the census to an emerging >transcendental vision of bodies, spaces, and time.= That is, apart from reducing people into numbers and categories, a system of administrative sub-units and territorial mapping >grounded= the data. Accordingly, the 1871 census generated 206 census districts numbered sequentially from west to east, each subdivided into subdistricts based on electoral districts. In this way, Curtis argues, >the new federal government first generated systematic geographical knowledge of its own administrative space B an elementary dimension of state formation and an infrastructural condition of systematic observation.= The Politics of Population is integral to understanding how the nascent Dominion of Canada evolved between 1840 and 1876 as statistical thinking emerged out of prior forms of historical, geographical, and literary description of people and places. Indeed, as Curtis puts it, the genesis of the Canadian census presents a unique opportunity to investigate >census making as an experimental science and to draw links between knowledge forms, state power, and social imaginaries.= Not only did it extend the administrative capacity of the state, it also serves to discipline political subjects by demanding their participation in the routinized assertion of central authority. Finally, with a census, you know what=s out there; with maps, you know where it is; with both, you can do something about it! I suppose Foucault was right after all. (BRIAN S. OSBORNE) Adele Perry. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849B1971 University of Toronto Press. viii, 288. $60.00, $24.95 On the Edge of Empire neatly pushes the boundaries of our thinking about the history of colonialism. Adele Perry leaves us in no doubt that we in Canada are just as implicated in this long sequence of events as those in any other part of the world. As Perry puts it succinctly, >British Columbia=s 436 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 problems were the empire=s problems.= By the time British Columbia was transformed into a settler colony, 1849B71, Europeans had for a good two centuries been determined to occupy as much as possible of the world with the supposed goal of >civilizing = Indigenous peoples into Christianity, at the same time exploiting them for economic advantage. They were firmly convinced of their right to do so. Gender assumptions limiting the roles of women ensured that most colonizers were male. These men sometimes engaged in sexual relationships with local women whose darker skin ensured that offspring would occupy a middling position between colonizers and colonized. Nineteenthcentury assertions of a scientific basis for differences in skin colour made colonizers even more confident in perceiving persons who were >white= as inherently and inevitably superior. Persons of mixed Indigenous and colonizer descent became so denigrated that the word contemporaries used to describe them in the North American setting, >halfbreed,= continues to have a strong pejorative connotation. On the Edge=s of Empire=s subtitle puts the book=s opening date at 1849, the year the fur trade colony of Vancouver Island was declared, but its effective start is 1858, the beginning of the gold rush. Some thirty thousand men poured into British Columbia that year, and many more followed over the next half dozen years of gold fever. Some were content to exist within a homosocial male culture...