Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (review)

Almost thirty years ago, labour historian Ross McCormack wrote: 'The ideas and experiences of [British] immigrants ... were of essential importance in the development of socialism in British Columbia because they provided personnel for a new movement.' At the time, the notion that British immigrant workers brought a particular mixture of radical politics and militant trade unionism with them as part of their cultural baggage had become embedded in the province's labour historiography, often being expressed as a variant of the broader 'western exceptionalism' thesis. Over the past decade or so, however, historians such as Jeremy Mouat, Robert McDonald, and Mark Leier have done much to challenge such a casual or causal relationship. Instead, as Mouat noted in an article published in this journal in 1991, British Columbia coalminers were just as likely to adopt 'strategies of collaboration and moderation' in their relations with capital.

Colonization and Community is a welcome and important contribution to this reassessment of labour in Canada's westernmost province. Some twenty years in the making, it reflects a breadth of research, an impressive fusion of methodologies and disciplines, and a substantial contribution to what we know - or think we know - about coalminers and their families on Vancouver Island in the second half of the nineteenth century. 'British Columbia's early working class was not imported with a ready-made ideological predisposition to which nothing could be added in the colony and from which nothing could be subtracted,' Belshaw argues. Instead, he concludes, 'to the extent that miners became radicalized at all, it was a consequence of events in British Columbia, not an ethnic predilection for militance.' Mouat and the others have already made this argument, to some extent. What Belshaw provides in addition is a detailed and mostly convincing account of just how British workers colonized Vancouver Island, the kind of communities they formed in the process, and how the experiences of emigration in turn helped to shape the character of the British Columbian working class.

In seven well-crafted and tightly written chapters, Belshaw discusses the imperial context of coalmining on Vancouver Island; the 'push-pull' factors that determined the 'who' and 'why' of British emigrant workers to the bc coalfields; the material and psychological challenges they faced as they built new communities on the island; conditions of work and levels of pay at the mines and the two broad responses - fight or flight - available to discontented miners; and, finally, the nature and meaning of the culture that emerged as those communities evolved. The result is a book that effectively revises and even redraws the standard image of British bc coalminers that appears in standard accounts of the province's history. 'The long-standing impression that the coalfield population was simply young, male, and single must be discarded,' Belshaw argues. For example, evidence for 1881 shows that the average British-born immigrant miner, at age 36.7 years, was in fact a decade or more older than either his Canadian-born (24.1 years) or American-born (27.3 years) counterpart. At the same time, at least 40 per cent of them had brought their wives and family with them from Britain. Indeed, much of Belshaw's work emphasizes the importance of the family to the emergent coalmining communities, in particular his discussions of extended families - usually revolving around the marriage of a daughter from one mining family into another - and the contributions of women and children to household incomes. Effectively, then, Belshaw stands the orthodox portrayal of labour in this region on its head. 'The presence, rather than the absence, of families must be integrated into explanations for the efflorescence of organizations like the Knights of Labor or the Western Federation of Miners,' he concludes...