"On the Edge of Empire is a book that delineates the centrality of race and gender in the making of colonial and national identities, and in the rewriting of Canadian history as colonial history. Utilizing feminist and post-colonial filters, Adele Perry designs a case study of British Columbia.

She draws on current work that aims to close the distance between 'home' and 'away' in order to make her case about the commonalities and differences between circumstances in British Columbia and those of the 'Anglo-American' culture that was increasingly dominant in North America, parts of the British Isles, and other white settler colonies.".

"On the Edge of Empire examines how a loosely connected group of reformers worked to transform an environment that lent itself to two social phenomena: white male homosocial culture and conjugal relationships between First Nations women and settler men. The reformers worked to replace British Columbia's homosocial culture with the practice of respectable, middle-class European masculinity.

Others encouraged mixed-race couples to conform to European standards of marriage and discouraged white-Aboriginal unions through moral suasion or the more radical tactic of racially segregated space. Another reform impetus laboured through immigration and land policy to both build and shape the settler population."--BOOK JACKET.