Pastoral Power, Governmentality and Cultures of Order in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia

I deploy Michel Foucault's concepts of pastoral power and governmentality to investigate the material consequences of two very different visions of the governance of Native people in nineteenth-century British Columbia. This entails a consideration of these modalities of power, and of the usefulness of relocating them in a colonial context. But I also argue that the conceptions of order embedded within these two modalities of power bear the stamp of, and demonstrate, very distinctive cultural geographies.     

Negotiating the production of space in Tl'azt'en territory, Northern British Columbia

Societies produce the space in which they operate through social practices that visualize, administer, and use lands and resources. Because Native peoples have held relatively little political power, their ability to influence the production of space has received little attention. Yet the superimposition of Euro‐Canadian social practices onto Native spaces rarely erased native spatiality, but rather created a territory made up of shared and hybrid spaces which resulted from the interaction of Native and Euro‐Canadian societies. This paper suggests that the social processes involved in the production of space are perhaps most visible when two parties are negotiating the allocation and management of lands and resources. In the 1970s the Tl'azt'en engaged in negotiations over the construction of a railway through their territory. Through the negotiations Tl'azt'en social and economic goals were inscribed to a significant degree in the spatial organization of the territory. Like current treaty negotiations, the 1970s negotiations involved compromises by both parties, and resulted in the creation of new hybrid social spaces which reflected the goals and strategies of both groups. Les sociétés produisent l'espace dans lequel elles opèrent à travers des pratiques sociales qui visualisent, administrent et utilisent les terres et les ressources. Parceque les peuple Natifs ont eu relativement peu de pouvoir politique, leur capacitéà influencer la production de l'espace a reçu peu d'attention. Cependant, l'imposition de pratiques sociales Euro‐Canadiennes sur les espaces Natfs a rarement effacé la spatialité indigené, mais a plutôt crée un territoire composé d'espaces partagés et hybrides, résultat de l'intéraction des sociétés indigènes et Euro‐Canadiennes. Cet exposé suggère que les procédés sociaux impliqués dans lá production de l'espace sont peut‐être plus visibles quand deux partis négocient l'allocation et la gestion des terres et des ressources. Dans les années 70, le peuple Tl'azt'en s'est engagé dans des négociations au sujet de la construction d'un chemin de fer à travers leur territoire. Dans ces négociations, les buts sociaux et économiques du Tl'azt'en furent inscrits à un degré significatif dans l'organisation spatiale du territoire. Comme les présentes négociations de traité, les négociations des années 1970 ont impliqué des compromis par les deux partis, et ont résultéà la création de nouveaux espaces sociaux hybrides qui reflétaient les buts et stratégies des deux groupes.     

Alice through the looking glass: emotion,personal connection,and reading colonial archives along the grain

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.     

Brutes, beasts and empire: veterinary medicine and environmental policy in French North Africa and British India

The deep, and persistent, colonial roots of many contemporary environmental policies around the world have been increasingly recognized over the last decade. Research in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, human medicine, and public health has illuminated how environmental policies were constructed and utilized during the colonial period, as well as how many of these policies remain influential today. This paper examines the as yet little explored contribution of colonial veterinary medicine to the development and implementation of environmental policy. By comparing the experiences of the French in North Africa and the British in India, it demonstrates that some colonial veterinarians had a great deal of influence on environmental policy while others had very little. In French North Africa veterinarians played a significant role in developing rangeland management policies that impacted large swaths of these three territories, policies that can still be felt today. In British India, by contrast, the role of colonial veterinarians in developing environmental policy was much more circumscribed and, in the end, largely inconsequential. The paper suggests that three primary factors account for most of this dissimilarity: the differences in animal diseases present in India and the Maghreb; the differences between French and British veterinary education before the twentieth century; and the differences in colonial administration between the two European powers.     

Problematizing Labour's Agency: Rescaling Collective Bargaining in British Columbia Pulp and Paper Mills

Abstract: This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers’ efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns—Port Alice and Port Alberni—to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers’ struggles to “defend place”; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography.     

New immigrant settlement in a mid-sized city: a case study of housing barriers and coping strategies in Kelowna, British Columbia

The successful integration of immigrants into a new society is based on their attainment of several basic needs, including access to adequate, suitable and affordable housing. While this has long been a concern in Canadian cities, such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal, it is also increasingly an issue in growing mid-sized cities such as Kelowna, in the interior of British Columbia. While Kelowna's real estate market is one of the most expensive in the country, there is little published data or literature on the housing experiences of immigrants in the city. This study examines the housing experiences and stresses of a small group of immigrants in Kelowna's rental housing market. This study uses data from five focus groups with 34 new immigrants and 20 interviews with key informants, conducted in Kelowna in summer 2008. The evidence indicates that for this group of immigrant newcomers, the housing search process in Kelowna's rental housing market met with significant barriers in locating affordable rental housing. Of these barriers, the most commonly cited were: (a) high housing costs; (b) lack of reliable housing information, including lack of access to organizations that provide housing help (government or not); and (c) prejudice by landlords based on the immigrants' ethnic and racial background.
This study points to the need for more comparative studies on the housing experiences of immigrants in mid-sized cities in Canada to better understand which groups of immigrants are more successful than others in finding affordable housing in these mid-sized cities, and why.     

Unstable properties: British Columbia,aboriginal title,and the “new relationship”

In the span of a few years, Premier Gordon Campbell transformed himself from a strong political critic of Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia to their apparent champion within a “new relationship.” The subsequent sudden collapse of Campbell's alliance with First Nations is a window into federal‐provincial relations, constitutional change, Aboriginal political organization, and the consequences of decisions made more than a century ago. Drawing on Nietzsche, we argue that Campbell's intentions, either to control or support Aboriginal peoples, were almost irrelevant; our focus should be on the “will to power” and efforts to stabilize power through territory. As a result of the collision of Aboriginal political mobilization, the expansion of natural resource development, and a series of court decisions, the unresolved nature of Canada's territorial claim to most of the land that is now British Columbia has finally reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, either politically or legally. However, the province lacks the legal authority to recognize or deny Aboriginal title, leaving the provincial government and indigenous peoples in British Columbia equally held hostage by the federal government.     

An anti‐racism methodology: The Native Sons and Daughters and racism against Asians in Nanaimo,British Columbia,Canada

Over the past number of years there has been increased interest in racism and anti‐racism amongst geographers. This paper focuses on one type of anti‐racism methodology that relates to critically interrogating my own white colonial settler ancestors and particularly the institutions and structures of which they were a part, and using those understandings to resist the contemporary increase in white supremacy and anti‐Asian racism. It also seeks to demonstrate the links between anti‐racism and decolonization. Particularly, I examine the Native Sons and Daughters of British Columbia, Canada, in the Nanaimo city area, where my great‐grandparents from northern England and Scotland settled as working‐class miners at the beginning of the 20^th century. I examine white working‐class settler racism against Asians, especially as practiced against Chinese and Japanese immigrants. While I do not argue that this is the only or even the most important type of anti‐racism methodology, this sort of research and associated production of knowledge can be useful in resisting present‐day anti‐Asian racism, even though I acknowledge that I am still embedded in colonial structures of racism and white privilege.     

Selling the Empire?: Marketing and the Demise of the British World,c.1920–1960

ABSTRACT

This article uses a study of the politics of marketing and advertising to consider the role that British World collaboration played in consumer politics in the UK and the Dominions between the 1920s and 1950s. We will assess how politicians and businesspeople in the Dominions responded to the Empire Marketing Board’s efforts to encourage the habit of ‘Buying British’ in the inter-war years, as well as exploring the activities of the leading American marketing agency, J. Walter Thompson. The article concludes with a discussion of how the politics of patriotic trade was recast in the 1950s. While this was a cause which had taken on different forms in Australia, Canada and South Africa during the 1930s, in each country its advocates shared a wider concern with imperial development. And yet, changes in the advertising and marketing industries, and the growth of market research, cut across efforts to promote the consumer habit of buying imperially. By the early 1960s patriotic trade campaigns in the ‘old’ Dominions were nationally focused and shorn of their earlier ‘Britannic’ identity.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.     

‘Dominion over palm and pine’: the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920–1947

During the first half of the twentieth century British imperialists invested ardent hopes in the emergence of a self-sufficient, competitive Empire. World War 1 focused some of those aspirations on the progressive management of forest resources, and in 1920 the UK launched a series of British Empire Forestry Conferences in pursuit of that aim. An uneven, intermittent exchange attempted to address the complexities of imperfectly understood cultural, economic, environmental, political, scientific, social and technical change, the pressure of extra-imperial influences, and the independent trajectories of ambitious settler Dominions. The Depression and World War 2 also entered the dynamic, severely testing the foresters' achievements and their resolve. From today's perspective the main products are a small window on the antecedents of modern forestry and the nucleus of a promising archive for interdisciplinary teaching and research.     

Island Despotism: Trinidad,the British Imperial Constitution and Global Legal Order

Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad’s troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.     

State,Parliament and Empire in the Mid 18th Century: Hudson's Bay and the Parliamentary Enquiry of 1749

In 1749, the house of commons appointed a committee of enquiry into the lands and trade of Hudson's Bay. This was the climax to nearly 20 years' work by the Ulsterman, Arthur Dobbs, which focused first on renewed search for a northwest passage and later widened to attempt to expand trade and settlement by challenging the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company. Dobbs's Irish patriotism, linked by support for union with Britain with his remarkably expansive vision of British empire, became concentrated on this campaign with a zeal and tenacity which overrode contrary evidence based on experience. Propaganda pamphlets, mobilisation of compatriots, merchant and political contacts, briefs for MPs, marshalling of evidence and witnesses for parliamentary committees, 30 petitions from a variety of places, organised by Liverpool and Bristol merchants who took the lead in the final campaign: all were used to attempt to influence parliament. This was an impressive mid-century effort to promote British commerce and manufactures, actively supported by the parliamentary opposition which was reviving under Leicester House leadership. Yet, while this campaign could shape the report of the committee of enquiry, the House itself was not so easily moved, especially when public expenditure was likely to be involved. A motion arising from the report was decisively defeated. The impressive campaign came to nought. While it indeed reveals powerful visions of commercial and imperial expansion in the mid 18th century, the outcome suggests that realism and scepticism prevailed at the heart of the state.     

Subjects,citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against ‘non-white’ subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half – sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis – cannot be upheld.     

Marconi,masculinity and the heroic age of science: wireless telegraphy at the British Association meeting at Dover in 1899

Abstract

In September 1899, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Dover, Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system was used to transmit messages across the English Channel (and across a national border) for the first time. This achievement represented a highly effective performance of scientific masculinity and constitutes a key turning point in an important struggle between competing interpretations of invention and innovation as masculine practices within British science. The British Association tended to favor a narrative of scientific research as a collectivist, international, gentlemanly-amateur pursuit, largely confined to the laboratory. Marconi, by contrast, explained the development of wireless telegraphy as the achievement of his own genius. Appealing not only to the established scientific elite but to a range of non-traditional audiences, and stressing the possibilities or ‘imagined uses’ of his technology even more so than his actual results, he succeeded in commanding unprecedented influence.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.