The Pacific Province: A History of British Columbia

W.J.C. Cherwinski is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the co-author of Lectures in Canadian Labour and
Working-Class History.

The 11 essays in this volume are the by-product of a cooperative venture
involving members of Simon Fraser University’s History
Department—past and present—and graduate students. Together, they
constitute a comprehensive survey of the major developments taking place
in historical scholarship on British Columbia.

R.L. Carson surveys the province’s prehistory, and essays on the
foundations of government (J.I. Little) and the nature of the colonial
society and economy (Sharon Meen) round out the discussion of the
pre-Confederation period. The editor, Hugh Johnston, discusses the
settlement period while Allan Seager examines the economy to the end of
World War I.

A similar pattern follows for the period after the Great War, with
essays by Robin Fisher and David Mitchell (politics), Mitchell and John
Belshaw (the economy), and Veronica Strong-Boag (20th-century B.C.
society). Another SFU veteran historian, Doug Cole, contributes an
eclectic piece entitled “Leisure, Taste and Tradition in British
Columbia” to close out the collection.

Considered as a whole, this collection lends academic respectability to
the notion, long held by other Canadians, that residents of the Wet
Coast—as Allan Fotheringham calls it—are different.