James Douglas and Histories of Blackness

Abstract

James Douglas (1803–1877) was a powerful fur trader and the governor of the British colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia during a long and critical period in their history. In this essay I explore Douglas’s complicated and revealing place within multiple and simultaneous histories of nineteenth-century Blackness. This essay draws on my 2015 Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World and aims to contribute to a growing critical scholarship on Black Canadian histories. I discuss Douglas’s history and identity and locate these within histories of free people of colour in the eastern Caribbean, histories of Blackness in mid-nineteenth-century British North America, and layered and intense politics of colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples in northwestern North America.