Colonial proximities :

“Encounters between aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations produced racial anxieties that underwrote cross racial interactions in the salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the (white) slavery scare in late-nineteenth- and – early- twentieth – century British Columbia. Colonial Proximities explores these contacts as politically charged sites of racial knowledge production in need of colonial governance. Drawing on archival documents, legal cases, and commissions of inquiry, Renisa Mawani traces the legal and spatial strategies of rule deployed by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities, who sought to restrict interracial encounters in the interests of securing racial and national purity. By connecting genealogies of aboriginal-European contact and Chinese migration, Mawani reveals that territorial dispossession and Chinese exclusion were never distance projects, but two conjunctive and overlapping processes in the making of settler regime." – Provided by publisher