On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia 1849-1871 (review)

Adele Perry's important book On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia 1849-1871 seeks to integrate the social history of mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia into the 'international history of imperialism' (194). Perry argues that mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia - where First Nations people heavily outnumbered white settlers and white men seeking first furs and then gold heavily outnumbered white women - failed to live up to the plans of imperial projectors and reformers: 'racially plural, rough and turbulent British Columbia bore little resemblance to the orderly, respectable, white settler colony that imperial observers hoped it would become' (3). The book is a close study of this tension, seen above all through the lens of gender history. In the opening sections, Perry argues that the rough white male homo-social culture of the backwoods and the prevalence of sexual relationships between white men and First Nations women represented a significant deviation from the Victorian colonial ideal. She goes on to examine reformers' attempts to remake the colony in more appropriate imperial guise, including the attempted regulation and reform of 'mixed-race' relationships, abortive attempts to segregate white cities, and organized drives to increase the number of white bodies in the colony, particularly fertile female bodies. She concludes that the nostalgia of many white British Columbians for a mythic 'British' past is ill-founded: Britain's hold on this colony, before it became part of Canada, was always fragile, and the territory was dominated by First Nations groups until far into the nineteenth century.

Perry's work is part of a wider scholarly re-examination of race and gender in imperial contexts, with particular focus on the politics of identity, inspired in part by such feminist scholars as Ann Laura Stoler, Catherine Hall, and Antoinette Burton. Perry's theoretical approach is not entirely original, but the application of this body of work to British Columbia is nonetheless very interesting. I will confess that in places I found the book perhaps too carefully beholden to its own theoretical structure; particularly in the opening chapters, I wished Perry would simply present her fascinating evidence in greater detail, allowing it to be messy, rather than imposing her authorial voice to repeat already-established theoretical points. This is, however, to some extent a matter of personal taste. Overall, On the Edge of Empire draws effectively on a range of scholarship in what one might call the new imperial history to put mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia into an imperial and international context without sacrificing local particularity. This lively, engaging, and politically impassioned work will doubtless prove rightly influential.

At the same time, I do have some queries about Perry's overall argument. In places Perry seems to reify British Victorianism, taking middle-class reformers at their word as the true representatives of a nation that was in reality fractured and diverse. Similarly, Perry downplays the range of types of imperialism, again perhaps taking reformers too much at their word in their efforts to claim the empire as a bastion of middle-class virtue. She ignores tensions between metropolitan reformers who opposed settler expansion and advocates of more extensive white settlement, for example. It might be more appropriate to think of resource extraction (spearheaded by single white men), white settler colonialism in particular regions justified by an ideology of domesticity, and reformist concerns from the metropolitan centre, as interwoven but still distinct variants of imperialism, rather than as a 'colonial project' and its challengers. Ironically, Perry explains that she deploys Nicholas Thomas's term colonial project to emphasize local particularity, and yet in practice she occasionally uses it as shorthand in a way that occludes contestation and diversity at the imperial centre as well. One might, in sum, see the confrontation between 'rough' working-class white men, working as fur traders and miners, and middle-class...