Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual, and the Law

This book examines Canadian experiences of social control, moral regulation, and governmentality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Informed by the wealth of theoretical and historical writings that have recently emerged on these subjects, the contributors explore diverse state, social, legal, and human encounters with the regulation of lives in British Columbia and Canadian history. Incest in the criminal courts, racial-ethnic dimensions of alcohol regulation, public health initiatives around venereal disease, and the seizure and indoctrination of Doukhobor children, among other issues, are examined in these nine original essays.