Description
Book SynopsisIn this beautifully crafted and written volume, Canada’s preeminent historical geographer traces how Canada’s geographical limitations have shaped the nature of its settler societies – from first contacts, to dispossession, to our current age of reconciliation.
Trade ReviewA Bounded Land is a guided tour through the work of a brilliant, insightful, and compassionate mind and body of work. -- James Murton * The Canadian Historical Review *
This is the most informative, penetrating and best-written account that I have read on the topic. -- Jim Reynolds * The Advocate *
A Bounded Land brings new dimensions and reflections to the work of Cole Harris as a scholar. The themes turn on settlement, colonization, dispossession, re-settlement, and the concluding theme throws light on Indigenous displacement and theories of empire and decolonization.
-- Barry Gough * The Ormsby Review *
Cole Harris has produced an eloquent compilation of work on settler colonialism in Canada. -- Ken Favrholdt, Kamloops, BC * BC Studies, Issue 209 *
There is a lot packed into this book ... [It] highlights the theoretical and practical policies that underwrote colonialism. In doing so, it helps to explain how the history of dispossession became inseparable from the rise of nation-states such as Canada.
-- Benjamin Hoy * The Canadian Journal of History *
It is to Harris’s credit that the innovative assembly of spatial and social vignettes in
A Bounded Land prompts our reflection on Indigenous and settler relations in colonial Canada. -- Grace Keng, Pennsylvania State University * University of Toronto Quarterly *
Overall, this book is not only a fitting capstone to an extroardinary career, but also an excellent primer for understanding Canada's settler colonial past. -- Ryan Hall, Colgate University * Pacific Historical Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part 1: Early Encounters
The Fraser Canyon Encountered
Imagining and Claiming the Land
Voices of Smallpox around the Strait of Georgia
Part 2: Early Settlements
Acadia: Settling the Marshlands
Of Poverty and Helplessness in Petite-Nation
The Settlement of Mono Township
Part 3: The Architecture of Settlement
European Beginnings in the Northwest Atlantic
The Overseas Simplification of Europe
Creating Place in Early Canada
Part 4: Reconfiguring British Columbia
The Making of the Lower Mainland
The Struggle with Distance
Indigenous Space
Part 5: Theorizing Settler Colonialism
Making an Immigrant Society
How Did Colonialism Dispossess?
Postscript: The Boundaries of Settler Colonialism
Notes and Further Readings; Index
