Becoming British Columbia: A Population History of British Columbia

"Becoming British Columbia is the first comprehensive, demographic history of this province. Investigating critical moments in the demographic record and linking demographic patterns to larger social and political questions, it shows how biology, politics, and history conspire with sex, death, and migration to create a particular kind of society. John Belshaw overturns the widespread tendency to associate population growth with progress by examining how the province's Aboriginal population of as much as half a million was reduced by disease to fewer than 30,000 people in less than a century...