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An examination of the social, political, and demographic history of British miners and their households on Vancouver Island in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century coal-miners imported from Europe, Asia, and eastern North America burrowed beneath the Vancouver Island towns of Nanaimo, Wellington, and Cumberland. No group was as numerous and influential in this enterprise as the hundreds of British immigrants who traveled half-way around the world to take up back-breaking work in the most remote colony in the Empire. What drew the British miners and their families to the north Pacific? Why did they set aside six months to journey to a colony about which they knew little? Once they reached Vancouver Island, what did they make of it and what did they make it into? And how did they re-make themselves in the process? In Colonization and Community John Belshaw takes a new look at British Columbia's first working class, the men, women, and children beneath and beyond the pit-head. Beginning with an exploration of emigrant expectations and ambitions, he investigates working conditions, household wages, racism, industrial organization, gender, schooling, leisure, community building, and the fluid identity of the British mining colony, the archetypal west coast proletariat. By connecting the story of Vancouver Island to the larger story of Victorian industrialization, he delineates what was distinctive and what was common about the lot of the settler society. Belshaw breaks new ground, challenging the easy assumptions of transferred British political traditions, analyzing the colonial at the household level, and revealing the emergent communities of Vancouver Island as the cradle of British Columbian working-class culture. --Publisher's description
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The Canadian working class was emerging well before 1867. By Confederation one could say for the first time that the growth of the working class was now unstoppable. The creation of the Dominion of Canada took place precisely at that moment when widespread industrialization was visibly underway. In 1851, fewer than a quarter of Hamilton, Ontario’s workers laboured in workshops of ten or more employees; by 1871 the share was more than 80%.[1] In less than two decades, Hamilton had been transformed from a market town dominated by commerce into a powerful symbol of heavy industry. Significant and startling though this change was at the time, it was dwarfed by developments in the 1890s. In that decade, Canadian economic growth simultaneously intensified in the older cities and found new fields in which to flourish in the West. The population of Canada in 1901 was 5,371,315; ten years later it was 7,206,643 – an increase of 34%. At the same time, however, the labour force grew from 1,899,000 in 1901 to 2,809,000 in 1911, a phenomenal 50% increase.[2] To put this into some perspective, there were only 3,463,000 people in the Dominion in 1867 — by 1911 there were close to that many working, wage-earning Canadians. The working class were motivated and shaped by different factors in the various regions of the country, although common themes were quick to arise. --Introduction
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