Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual, and the Law

Elaine G. Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

British Columbia is the setting for the nine essays in this book,
spanning the period roughly from the beginning of the 19th to the
mid-20th century. Each essay shows the ways in which the province served
as a microcosm of the patriarchal and capitalist civilizing project of
European settlers throughout Canada.

Although the moral regulation approach, based on Foucault, is the
guiding theoretical perspective, it is only loosely applied. The
objective of the authors is to document the development of surveillance
tactics through the collaboration of multifaceted levels of control. The
various chapters deal with the sources and methods of control attempted
over what was defined by the colonizers as deviant behavior. These
included intermarriage between Aboriginal people and settlers,
alcoholism, incest, venereal disease, child abuse and neglect, mental
illness, prostitution, and refusal to send children to public schools.
Socially constructed as the sources of these problems were the usual
suspects: Aboriginal women, Asian immigrants, unmarried women who
frequented public places, men and women from working-class families, and
the Sons of Freedom. Sending Asian mental patients to China after years
of residency in British Columbia was just one of the injustices meted
out.

Sometimes long on detail, but also containing gripping accounts of
injustice, chapter after chapter documents the matter-of-fact way in
which the mores of the British empire pervaded governmental, legal, and
professional judgments about those who were seen to be the social
problems of the day. It was not conspiracy, but the coming together of
various factions in society to define certain groups as not deserving
the rights of white, Anglo, usually male citizens. Ironically, these
same citizens used scarcely legal tactics to incarcerate and deport,
purportedly in the service of civility.