Vancouver Island In The Empire

During the century 1850-1950, Vancouver Island attracted Imperial officers, civil servants, medical officers, businessmen, and others from India, the British Isles, and elsewhere in the Empire. Victoria was the main British port on the northwest Pacific Coast for forty years before the city of Vancouver was founded in 1886 to be the coastal terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. These two coastal cities were historically and geographically different, as well as seventy miles apart. The Island and British Columbia were combined in 1866 and joined Canada in 1871. Thirty-five years later, the Royal Navy withdrew from its Esquimalt station, but the Island communities did not lose their Imperial character until the 1950s. J. F. Bosher's first ancestor on Vancouver Island was Sarah Taylor Marsden (1833-1916), who sailed 14,300 miles from Liverpool around Cape Horn in the "Bride Ship" Robert Lowe, arriving in Victoria in January 1863. The author's father emigrated from Berkshire in 1920 and became an inspector of commercial bulb crops for the Dominion Experimental Station in Saanich. After a Dipl me d' tudes sup rieures at the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. at London University, the author taught history at King's College London, the University of British Columbia, Cornell University, and York University in Toronto.

"During the century 1850-1950 Vancouver Island attracted Imperial officers and other Imperials from India, the British Isles, and elsewhere in the Empire. Victoria was the main British port on the north-west Pacific Coast for forty years before the city of Vancouver was founded in 1886 to be the coastal terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. These two coastal cities were historically and geographically different. The Island joined Canada in 1871 and thirty-five years later the Royal Navy withdrew from Esquimalt, but Island communities did not lose their Imperial character until the 1950s."--Page 4 of cover.

During the century 1850-1950, Vancouver Island attracted Imperial officers, civil servants, medical officers, businessmen, and others from India, the British Isles, and elsewhere in the Empire. Victoria was the main British port on the northwest Pacific Coast for forty years before the city of Vancouver was founded in 1886 to be the coastal terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. These two coastal cities were historically and geographically different, as well as seventy miles apart. The Island and British Columbia were combined in 1866 and joined Canada in 1871. Thirty-five years later, the Royal Navy withdrew from its Esquimalt station, but the Island communities did not lose their Imperial character until the 1950s.J. F. Bosher's first ancestor on Vancouver Island was Sarah Taylor Marsden (1833-1916), who sailed 14,300 miles from Liverpool around Cape Horn in the "Bride Ship" Robert Lowe, arriving in Victoria in January 1863. The author's father emigrated from Berkshire in 1920 and became an inspector of commercial bulb crops for the Dominion Experimental Station in Saanich. After a Dipl�me d'�tudes sup�rieures at the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. at London University, the author taught history at King's College London, the University of British Columbia, Cornell University, and York University in Toronto.

Imperial Vancouver Island, Who was Who 1850-1950 is an enlarged second edition of an A to Z biographical dictionary of about 800 British officers, civil servants, and others from the British Isles and other parts of the Empire who retired to Vancouver Island or who lived there for some time.

During the 1850s and 1860s, there was considerable anxiety among British settlers over the potential for Indigenous rebellion and violence. Yet, publicly admitting to this fear would have gone counter to Victorian notions of racial superiority. In this fascinating book, Kenton Storey challenges the idea that a series of colonial crises in the mid-nineteenth century led to a decline in the popularity of humanitarianism across the British Empire. Instead, he demonstrates how colonial newspapers in New Zealand and on Vancouver Island appropriated humanitarian language as a means of justifying the expansion of settlers’ access to land, promoting racial segregation and allaying fears of potential Indigenous resistance.

In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specific interests, and how the dawn of Native-Western contact in this part of the world might be studied 200 years later, in the light of ongoing struggles between Natives and non-Natives over land and cultural status. Between the 1770s and 1850s, the Native people of Vancouver Island were engaged by three sets of forces that were of general importance in the history of Western overseas expansion: the West's scientific exploration of the world in the Age of Enlightenment; capitalist practices of exchange; and the geopolitics of nation-state rivalry. Islands of Truth discusses these developments, the geographies they worked through, and the stories about land, identity, and empire stemming from this period that have shaped understanding of British Columbia's past and present. Clayton questions premises underlying much of present B.C. historical writing, arguing that international literature offers more fruitful ways of framing local historical experiences. Islands of Truth is a timely, provocative, and vital contribution to post-colonial studies.

Finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the 2021 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize "Meticulously researched and vividly drawn, Orphans of Empire brings to life the half-forgotten world of early British Columbia. This is an immersive, shimmering novel." —Steven Price, author of #1 nationally bestselling By Gaslight and Giller-shortlisted Lampedusa In Grant Buday's new novel, three captivating stories intertwine at the site of the New Brighton Hotel on the shores of Burrard Inlet. In 1858 the serious and devoted Sir Richard Clement Moody receives the commission of a lifetime when he is sent to help establish "a second England"—what is now British Columbia. In 1865 Frisadie, an eighteen-year-old Kanaka housemaid, who is more entrepreneur than ingénue, arrives in New Brighton from Hawaii. She convinces Maxie Michaud to purchase the hotel with her, and it soon becomes the toast of the inlet. In 1885 Henry Fannin, a young, curious embalmer and magnetism devotee, having struck out in London and San Francisco, arrives in New Brighton and promptly falls in love with a tragic woman he hears crying on his first night at the hotel. Endearing, funny, and highly evocative of time and place, Orphans of Empire celebrates those living in the shadow of history's supposed heroes, their private struggles and personal agendas. Readers who loved Michael Crummey's Galore and Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World, will love this vivid novel of arrivals that prods at the ethics of settlement.