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This article considers the relationship between the increasingly humanized spaces of early Canada and the patches of settlement that, at Confederation, were assembled into a country. It suggests that Harold Innis correctly identified some of the essential spaces of early Canada as, in his American way, did Frederick Jackson Turner. Both, however, offer limited perspectives: Innis because his analysis ill fit the areas of agricultural settlement where most people lived, Turner because of the imprecisions of his analysis and also because, in early Canada, the bounded nature of agricultural settlement severely constricted the westward expansion on which his analysis turned. But Innis was right about staple trades in non-agricultural areas, and Turner was right that areas of recent agricultural settlement were loci of particularly rapid cultural change. Both analyses can be filled in, and that, particularly with regard to Turner, this article attempts to do. In so doing, it considers the extent to which the early rural societies in Canada, the loci of most lives, can be considered to have been ideologically liberal. It also considers the particular patterns of secondary migration in and beyond bounded settlements, and their relationship to the construction and maintenance of social and cultural difference. Overall, the article suggests that the receptacles within which countries develop are important, that the Canadian and American receptacles were strikingly different, and that the spaces of early Canadian life have their continuing legacies in an ongoing engagement with sparsely settled land and with very different ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis on culture in studies of colonialism tends to obscure other forms of colonial power while making it impossible to contextualize the cultural argument and assess its salience. Rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation, as the colonial discourse literature is wont to do, a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism's basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized. In so doing, the issue of power is not prejudged and the particular roles of different modes and theories of colonial power come into focus. I explore these propositions by considering the powers underlying the reserve (reservation) system in British Columbia, a system that, by allocating a tiny fraction of the land to native people and opening the rest for development, facilitated the geographical reorganization of the province. My conclusions are these: the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state; the momentum to dispossess derived from the interest of capital in profit and of settlers in forging new livelihoods; the legitimation of and moral justification for dispossession lay in a cultural discourse that located civilization and savagery and identified the land uses associated with each; and the management of dispossession rested with a set of disciplinary technologies of which maps, numbers, law, and the geography of resettlement itself were the most important. Although no one body of theory explains colonial power, several theoretical perspectives yield crucial insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Introduces two articles on presences and absences in the literature of British Columbia. Gaps or absences in British Columbian history; Different faces of imperialism from the perspective of the center and the margin.