Mining the Connections: Class, Community, Ethnicity and Gender in Nanaimo, B.C., 1891

Abstract

In British Columbia the 1891 census of Canada coincided with the largest and most politically consequential strike recorded in the province to that time. The Wellington strike was a drawn-out dispute over the refusal of one of the most important capitalists in British Columbia, the Dunsmuir interests on Vancouver Island, to recognize the Mines and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association. The authors use this combination of events to examine some aspects of the relationship between industrial growth and social relations in nineteenth-century Nanaimo. This community, a hitherto obscure outpost of industry and empire, was being transformed into a place where class, ethnic/racial, and gender roles took on an appropriate and respectable order.