Visions of Agriculture in British Columbia

Abstract

OVER T H E PAST FIFTEEN years or so, North American social scientists have slowly rediscovered the countryside — the farms, fields, and villages where, until quite recently, the vast majority of people lived in local worlds of kith and kin. Approaches vary and disputes abound in this new literature, but the development and transformation of rural capitalism has been a subject of particular interest. This enthusiasm for rural history has not yet spread to British Columbia. Perhaps it is because this province has little countryside of its own. The highrises of downtown Vancouver, like the smokestacks of Kootenay smelters, are hemmed in by mountains and forest. Everywhere, cityscape presses against wilderness without the intermediate agrarian landscape so familiar in Europe and eastern North America. Perhaps it is the continuing legacy of the staple theorists for whom British Columbia, like Canada itself, was made by its staple industries: first the fur trade, then the gold rush, hard-rock mining, and lumbering. The production of these raw, relatively unprocessed commodities for the world market has engendered a very particular social geography. In the workcamps, mine shafts, and sawmill towns of early British Columbia, a largely male workforce of diverse, but racially segmented, origin confronted a fully developed international capitalism. Staple theorists and labour historians have shown no interest in family farms employing little wage labour and producing for small, local markets on the margins of the capitalist space economy. Whatever the reason, rural fife, agriculture, and the countryside in British Columbia have remained almost uncharted historical terri-