Adele Perry On The Edge Of Empire Summary

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Book Reviews 117 B OOK REVIEWS On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 A dele Perry T oronto: University of Toronto Press, 2 001. 320 p p. Illus. $ 60.00 c loth; $24.95 p aper. SARAH CARTER University I n this lively history, Adele Perry d emonstrates that, despite protracted efforts to create an orderly W h i t e settler colony anchored in " respectable" gender and racial behaviours, during the years between 1849 a n d 1871 B ritish Columbia was a "racially plural, rough and turbulent" p lace, where the inhabitants challenged the norms and values of mainstream nineteenth-century AngloAmerican society. British Columbia failed to live up to imperial expectations, Perry argues,…show more content…
Given this, E vans argues that, in order to make s ense of the past, historians must "confront their anthropocentric biases" (viii) and broaden their concept of a gency to include both "human and n on-human sources of causation" (xiii). L est readers of BC Studies g et the w rong idea, The War on Weeds is not a m anifesto for plants' rights; rather, it is an argument about the changing r elationship between a particular group of plants and people over a century and a half. F rom 1800 t o 1945 C anadian farmers and the country's agricultural e stablishment developed a deeply a dversarial relationship with weeds. T heir attitudes and practices stood in m arked contrast and were, in many i nstances, a direct repudiation of those they had learned in Britain. A distinctive " blindly oppositional" culture of weeds first emerged in Ontario and gained its fullest and most vitriolic expression in the Prairie west. There, it manifested itself in draconian legislation - noxious w eed laws that by the 1940s "rivalled various war measures acts" (no) in terms of the emergency powers they granted t he state - v ast and costly government bureaucracies devoted to weed

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