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“The Whites are Wild about It”: Taxation and Racialization in Mid-Victorian British Columbia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2013

Elsbeth Heaman
Elsbeth Heaman*
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 354 - 384
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 83, 498 (November 1891), 883.

2. Jiwu Wang, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859–1867 (Waterloo, 2006), 10–11.

3. The census of 1881 records the presence of 4,383 Chinese in Canada, only 33 of them living east of British Columbia. By 1891, in the wake of CPR influx, 9,129 Chinese appear in the census, 219 of whom lived east of British Columbia.

4. Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London, 2007).Google Scholar

5. Goutor, David, “Constructing the ‘Great Menace’: Canadian Labour’s Opposition to Asian Immigration, 1880–1914,” Canadian Historical Review 88, no. 4 (2007): 549–76; see also his Guarding the Gates: The Canadian Labour Movement and Immigration, 1872–1934 (Vancouver, 2007).Google Scholar

6. Goutor, “Constructing the ‘Great Menace,’” 560.

7. Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830–1910 (Ithaca, 1976), 60.

8. Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).Google Scholar

9. Pan, Lynn, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (Boston, 1990), 33.Google Scholar

10. Huttenback, Racism and Empire, 14.

11. Marshall, Daniel P., “Mapping a New Socio-Political Landscape: British Columbia, 1871–1874,” Social History/Histoire sociale 31, no. 61 (1998): 127–55.Google Scholar

12. Dening, Greg, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992), 269.Google Scholar

13. See Kwass, Michael, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000).Google Scholar

14. Timothy Stanley, “John A. Macdonald, Chinese Exclusion, and the Origins of Canadian White Supremacy,” paper presented at the workshop “John A. Macdonald: Fresh Perspectives and New Legacies,” Ryerson University, Toronto, 3–4 December 2010; see also his Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Antiracism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians (Vancouver, 2011); Mar, Lisa, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (Oxford, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. “L’État grec, son passé et son avenir,” Interview with Anastassios Anastassiadis, by Nicolas Delalande, La Vie des Idées: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20120223_etatgrec.pdf

16. See McDonald, Robert A. J., “The Quest for ‘Modern Administration’: British Columbia’s Civil Service, 1870s to 1940s,” B.C. Studies 161 (2009): 9–34. http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/bcstudies/article/view/557/601.Google Scholar

17. BC did not join Canada in time for the 1871 census; that of 1881 showed a population of 50,387, of whom 26,849 were listed as Aboriginal, 19,069 as “whites,” 274 as “Africans,” and 4,195 as “Chinese.” See Robert Galois and Cole Harris, “Recalibrating Society: The Population Geography of British Columbia in 1881,” Canadian Geographer 38, no. 1 (1994): 37–53.

18. British Colonist, 27 January 1871.

19. British Colonist, 16 January 1872.

20. British Colonist, 27 February 1872.

21. Roy, Patricia, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858–1914 (Vancouver, 1989) 46–47.Google Scholar

22. British Colonist, 27 February 1872.

23. Novak, William, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America, ” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Jacobs, Meget al. (Princeton, 2003): 85–119.Google Scholar

24. A brief list would include, as well as Roy, Patricia and Goutor, David, Lutz, John S., Makuk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver, 2008)Google Scholar; Perry, Adele, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loo, Tina, Making Law, Order, and Authority in British Columbia, 1821–1871 (Toronto, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisher, Robin, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia (Vancouver, 1977)Google Scholar; Cole Harris, R., Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver, 2002).Google ScholarMawani’s, RenisaColonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (Vancouver, 2009) is a rare monograph that connects Indigenous and Chinese legal and political entanglements.Google Scholar

25. British Colonist, 28 February and 10 March 1872; 13 January 1874.

26. British Colonist, 6 May 1876.

27. Public Archives of British Columbia, GR 526, 567/1876.

28. British Colonist editorial, “Hunting Men,” 17 October 1880.

29. GR 216, British Columbia, Government Agent, Cariboo, 194/1882 and 244/1883; GR 526, 273/1881.

30. GR 526, 594/1883.

31. British Colonist, 22 and 30 April 1880.

32. British Colonist, 10 May 1878.

33. GR 526 (PS), 643 and 662 of 1876.

34. GR 1741 (Treasury), 64/1878, 545/1879, 72/1879.

35. GR 1741 (Treasury), 480/1878, 756/1879, 801/1879; British Colonist, 8 November 1881.

36. GR 526 (PS), 603/1876; 8 and 66/1877.

37. GR 1741 (Treasury), 156/1878.

38. On Chinese brokers, see Mar, Brokering Belonging.

39. Roy, A White Man’s Province, 44–45.

40. GR 526 (PS), 351/1879, 97/1880, 55/1880,73/1880, 323/1879.

41. GR 1741 (Treasury), 170/1874, enclosure by G. Walkem, 5 May 1873.

42. GR 526 (PS), 449/1881 and 924/1883.

43. On the constitutional tensions and use of the federal veto against BC’s anti-Chinese legislation more generally, see Ryder, Bruce, “Racism and the Constitution: The Constitutional Fate of British Columbia Anti-Asian Immigration Legislation, 1884–1909,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 29 (1991): 619–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Chow, Lily, Sojourners in the North (Vancouver, 1996), 26.Google Scholar

45. GR 1741 (Treasury), 648/1881.

46. GR 429 Attorney General’s Records, 764/1881.

47. GR 1741 (Treasury), 805/1881 and 1186/1881.

48. GR 526 (PS), 541/1884.

49. Loo, Making Law.

50. British Colonist, 7 February 1879 and 13 April 1882.

51. Canada, Hansard, Debates of the House of Commons 15 April 1881.

52. British Columbia. Papers connected with the Indian land question, 1850–1875 (Victoria, 1875); Sessional Papers (1876): 175.

53. GR 526 37/1880.

54. GR 526, 279 and 290 of 1872; GR 1459, Attorney General opinions, box 1, file 8, no. 21, 26 May 1871.

55. GR 526, 564/1876.

56. GR 1741/1879.

57. Campbell to Macdonald, 26 September 1883, in Library and Archives Canada, RG 10, vol. 3656, 9059.

58. Ibid., Powell to Van Koughnet 30 January 1884.

59. LAC, RG10 Black Series, vol. 3949, 127 592, passim.

60. Ibid., J. D. Maclean to Vowell, 28 December 1909.

61. Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, Report and Evidence (Ottawa, 1885), 60, 62, 68.

62. GR 216, [unnumbered 191a] W. Stephenson to John Bowron, 28 January 1879: “I have not got in any School Tax for 79 yet think if I can wait until the Chinamen come to the office to pay I will have a good time of it in waiting. There will be more of them delinquent than there will be to come and pay.” In 1881, he explained that his accounts were late because he was “going through” the Chinese to find delinquents for the poll tax on the Fraser River: GR 1741 1577/1881.

63. GR 1741 233/1885; 313/1885; 246/1885; 821/1885; 264/1885; 260/1885.

64. GR 1741 768/1885 and 613/1887; GR 526 (PS) 325/1885.

65. British Colonist, 8 November 1881.

66. GR 441, Premier’s Papers, 6, 1 85/97, E. H. Turner corresponding with Rev. E. D. McLaren.

67. Baskerville, Peter A., “Financial Capital and the Municipal State: The Case of Victoria, British Columbia, 1910–1936,” Studies in Political Economy 21 (Autumn 1986): 83–106Google Scholar; E. A. Heaman, “Revisiting the Single Tax in Western Canada,” paper presented at “Transformation: State, Nation, and Citizenship in a New Environment. A Conference on the Future of Political History,” York University, 13–15 October 2011.

68. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 4.