Beyond the City Limits

Historians have not usually identified British Columbia as a ruralprovince. B.C. historiography has been dominated by mining, logging,and fishing, and theorized within the context of large-scale,laissez-faire capitalism and economic individualism. Silences in thehistorical record have exacerbated this situation and lent tacitsupport to the dominance of resource-based capitalism as the shapingforce in B.C. history.

The essays in Beyond the City Limits, all published herefor the first time, decisively break this silence and challengetraditional readings of B.C. history. In this wide-ranging collection,R.W. Sandwell draws together a distinguished group of contributors whobring expertise, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives taken fromsocial and political history, environmental studies, culturalgeography, and anthropology. They discuss such diverse topics asAboriginal-White settler relations on Vancouver Island, pimping andviolence in northern BC, and the triumph of the coddling moth overOkanagan orchardists, to show that a narrow emphasis on resourceextraction, capitalist labour relations, and urban society is simplynot broad enough to adequately describe those who populated theprovince's history.

By challenging the dominant urban-based and overwhelminglycapitalist interpretation of the province's history, theprovocative essays in Beyond the City Limits expand ourunderstanding of what "rural" was and what it meant in thehistory of British Columbia.