The Oriental Question

Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association. Patricia Roy's latest book, The Oriental Question, continues her study into why British Columbians -- and many Canadians from outside the province -- were historically so opposed to Asian immigration. Drawing on contemporary press and government reports and individual correspondence and memoirs, Roy shows how British Columbians consolidated a "white man's province" from 1914 to 1941 by securing a virtual end to Asian immigration and placing stringent legal restrictions on Asian competition in the major industries of lumber and fishing. While its emphasis is on political action and politicians, the book also examines the popular pressure for such practices and gives some attention to the reactions of those most affected: the province's Chinese and Japanese residents. It is a critical investigation of a troubling period in Canadian history.

"We are not strong enough to assimilate races so alien from us in their habits … We are afraid they will swamp our civilization as such. " -- Nanaimo Free Press, 1914 A White Man's Province examines how British Columbians changed their attitudes towards Asian immigrants from one of toleration in colonial times to vigorous hostility by the turn of the century and describes how politicians responded to popular cries to halt Asian immigration and restrict Asian activities in the province. White workingmen objected to Asian sojourning habits, to their low living standards and wages, and to their competition for jobs in specific industries. Because employers and politicians initially supported Asian immigrants, early manifestations of antipathy often appeared just as another dispute between capital and labour. But as their number increased, complaints about Asians became widespread, and racial characteristics became the nucleus of such terms as a 'white man's province' -- a 'catch phrase' which, as Roy notes, 'covered a wide variety of fears and transcended particular economic interests.' The Chinese were the chief targets of hostility in the nineteenth century; by the twentieth, the Japanese, more economically ambitious and backed by a powerful mother country, appeared more threatening. After Asian disenfranchisement in the 1870s, provincial politicians, freed from worry about the Asian vote, fueled and exploited public prejudices. The Asian question also became a rallying cry for provincial rights when Ottawa disallowed anti-Asian legislation. Although federal leaders such as John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier shared a desire to keep Canada a 'white man's country,' they followed a policy of restraint in view of imperial concerns. The belief that whites should be superior, as Roy points out, was then common throughout the Western world. Many of the arguments used in British Columbia were influenced by anti-Asian sentiments and legislation emanating from California, and from Australia and other British colonies. Drawing on almost every newspaper and magazine report published in the province before 1914, and on government records and private manuscripts, Roy has produced a revealing historical account of the complex basis of racism in British Columbia and of the contribution made to the province in these early years by its Chinese and Japanese residents.

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Collection of those articles concerning China and the Chinese, assembled at the behest of Charles W. Wason, with t.p. modified and table of contents supplied in typescript.

A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth century In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time? In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature. Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.