SAMPLE BOOK PROPOSAL
threads, I expand beyond their case studies to investigate a wider range of people, relationships, and
letter-writing practices as these contributed to the foundations of settler colonial British Columbia.
By examining family correspondence, the book’s primary purpose is to intervene in the
distinct but overlapping fields of settler colonial studies and Canadian colonial historiography. Settler
colonial studies is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field, which seeks to theorize and historicize settler
colonialism as a specific form of colonialism. This work tends to focus on Indigenous-settler
relations, with an emphasis on settler state efforts to dispossess and eliminate Indigenous peoples, to
exclude and exploit newcomers of colour, and to assert settler sovereignty and establish new political
structures.
In the Canadian context, this work builds on a longer tradition of historical research on
colonialism. Some of the recent scholarship in this area speaks to the theoretical and analytical
approaches of settler colonial studies, although not all historians affiliate with this specific field.
Either way, the Canadian scholarship similarly positions Indigenous-settler relations and race as the
primary prisms through which to investigate histories of colonialism. Within this framing, the
existing research – including in British Columbia-focused studies – has concentrated on the
connections between race, gender, sexuality, and space; racialized settler laws, policies, and practices
related to land or immigration; the exercise of physical and non-physical colonial violence; settler
anxiety or vulnerability; and the continuation and impact of Indigenous resistance to settler regimes.
In all of these ways, the field has shed critical light on the historical trajectories of racialization,
dispossession, resettlement, and white supremacy in Canada.
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This book tells a different history of settler colonialism, which complements and extends the
existing work in these fields. As I suggest, Indigenous-settler relations, race, and the other existing
foci of the scholarship were indeed fundamentally important in the history of settler colonialism, but
on their own, these cannot explain how and why Britons actually settled in British Columbia. In the
Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charlotte
Macdonald, “Intimacy of the Envelope: Fiction, Commerce, and Empire in the Correspondence of Friends Mary Taylor
and Charlotte Brontë, c. 1845-55,” in
Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire
, eds. Tony
Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Elizabeth Jane Errington,
Emigrant Worlds
and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
(Kingston and Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Konstantin Dierks,
In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early
America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); and Cassandra A. Good,
Founding Friendships: Friendships
between Men and Women in the Early American Republic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter five.
For example, Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,”
Journal of Genocide Research
8, 4
(2006):
387-409; Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, eds.,
Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race,
Place and
Identity
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Lorenzo Veracini,
Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview
(Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Scott Lauria Morgensen,
Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous
Decolonization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Edward Cavanagh,
Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in
South Africa:
Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Emma Battell Lowman
and Adam J.
Barker,
Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada
(Halifax: Fernwood, 2015); and Edward
Cavanagh and Lorenzo
Veracini, eds.,
Routledge Handbook on the History of Settler Colonialism
(New York: Routledge, 2017)