A Sweeping History Of British Columbia

British Columbia defies easy summary. It is a place of staggering natural beauty and deep human contradiction — a province built on Indigenous land without treaty or consent, enriched by the labour of people it then tried to exclude, and shaped by conflicts between capital and workers that were fiercer here than almost anywhere else in Canada. It is also a place of genuine breakthrough: of land claims won after a century of struggle, of radical unions that changed what workers could demand, of environmental movements that began on a Vancouver waterfront and spread around the world.

In Where the Mountains Meet the Sea, Daniel Hardy tells the full story of British Columbia from the sophisticated civilizations of its first peoples through the upheavals of the gold rush, the brutal construction of the transcontinental railway, the Depression-era On-to-Ottawa Trek, and the Japanese Canadian internment — one of the most shameful acts in Canadian history — to the contemporary crises of unaffordable housing, the opioid epidemic, and a climate emergency that is remaking the province's landscape in real time.

Hardy writes with the authority of a historian and the propulsive clarity of a storyteller, restoring to the record the voices and experiences that official history too often leaves out: the Chinese labourers who built the railway and were then taxed for the privilege of staying, the Indigenous nations who never stopped asserting their title, the workers who organized under conditions that would be unrecognizable today.

This is British Columbia whole — unvarnished, urgent, and impossible to put down.