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list price: $89.95
edition:Hardcover
also available: eBook Paperback
category: History
published: May 2019
ISBN:9780774838436
publisher: UBC Press

Nothing to Write Home About

British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia

by Laura Ishiguro

tagged: great britain, indigenous studies
Description

Nothing to Write Home About uncovers the significance of British family correspondence sent between the United Kingdom and British Columbia between 1858 and 1914. Drawing on thousands of letters, Laura Ishiguro offers insights into epistolary topics including familial intimacy and conflict, everyday concerns such as boredom and food, and what correspondents chose not to write. She shows that Britons used the post to navigate family separations and understand British Columbia as an uncontested settler home. These letters and their writers played a critical role in laying the foundations of a powerful settler order that continues to structure the province today.

About the Author

Laura Ishiguro

Contributor Notes

Laura Ishiguro is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where she is a historian of settler colonialism, mobility, family, and the everyday in Canada and the British Empire. Her research has been published in a number of edited collections and journals, including a 2016 article in BC Studies – “Growing Up and Grown Up […] in Our Future City: Discourses of Childhood and Settler Futurity in Colonial British Columbia” – which won the 2017 Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism article prize. She has also coedited (with Esmé Cleall and Emily J. Manktelow) a 2013 special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History on histories of family in the British Empire, and edited a 2016 special issue of BC Studies on histories of settler colonialism in British Columbia. She is an associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University (2017–20) and a recipient of the Killam Teaching Prize at UBC (2018).

Awards
  • Commended, The Wilson Book Prize, McMaster University
Editorial Reviews

Laura Ishiguro has written a fine book. Her meticulous examination of colonial correspondence is engaging and illuminating. She displays a considerable sensitivity for the language used by white settlers to discursively claim British Columbia and normalise their presence there. Ishiguro is especially skilful in summarising her conclusions at the end of each chapter, fluently articulating the tangled voices of British settlers.

— The Ormsby Review

"[...]seemingly disparate topics are interwoven with the central threads of settler colonialism and trans-imperial family relations to produce a cohesive and sophisticated analysis."

— Left History

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