Content area
Full Text
John Douglas Belshaw, Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (Vancouver: UBC Press 2009)
"British Columbia's history is fundamentally a demographic history." (xi) So begins John Belshaw's Becoming British Columbia: a Population History. Over the past twenty years a bountiful harvest of new books has greatly enriched our understanding of British Columbia's past, expanding our knowledge of a place whose history has been, in Belshaw's words, "consistently unusual." (188) But apart from excellent but limited studies by Jean Barman, Robert Boyd, Robert Galois, Cole Harris, Julie Macdonald, and Peter Ward, the demographic changes that provided the engines of provincial development have not been examined in a comprehensive manner. Creating such a study is the challenge that John Belshaw has posed in Becoming British Columbia.
He approaches this "systematic" analysis of British Columbia's population not through "a highly technical exercise in statistics" (16) but rather through a careful analysis of available sources, including the obvious state-generated data as well as unexplored primary sources such as church records and undertakers' registers. Especially important is Belshaw's case study of the household structure and demographic makeup of two communities, Nanaimo and Kamloops, from 1881 to 1901. The latter work has generated important new insights on nuptiality, and especially the fact of remarriage under "frontier" conditions; on fertility, including the high fertility rate in the coal mining community of Nanaimo compared to the ranching and transportation centre of Kamloops; and on mortality in a male-dominated resource-based province, which he argues convincingly was "distinct (to British Columbia) in several respects." (164) His insightful discovery of a "shockingly high" infant mortality rate in Nanaimo, a relatively prosperous mining community, stands out with particular clarity. Indeed, the three chapters on "Sex Ratios and Nuptiality," "Fertility," and "Mortality," which offer new empirical insights about BCs population history, constitute the heart of the book. For instance, a convincing case is made for fuller appreciation of the effect that the Great War had on the province's population development through the inter-war years. In the chapter on fertility Belshaw draws on one of the big ideas...