John H. Hinde has explored the history of coal mining in B.C., which began at Fort Rupert in 1848, by concentrating on the town of Ladysmith. The origins of the Great Strike of 1912-1914 are illuminated in When Coal Was King: Ladysmith and the Coal-Mining Industry on Vancouver Island (UBC Press $85, $29.95). In 1911, prior to the Great Strike, the Island's collieries employed more than 4,600 men and mined a record 1,855,661 gross tons of coal. Following an agreement to exclude the Chinese from underground work at Wellington and Nanaimo in 1888, the Chinese were only allowed to work underground at the most dangerous mine on the Island, at Union. Trade unionists later argued Chinese labourers should not take jobs because they were inherently unsafe workers. As the author of Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (McGill-Queens 2000), UVic and Malaspina College professor Hinde has received the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association.
0-7748-0935-3 cl; 0-7748-0936-1 pb.

[BCBW Summer 2004]