In 1900, the Indian Agent for the Williams Lake Agency submitted an annual report to the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. The report intended to provide knowledge of the indigenous population and included a census and inspections of health, economic productivity, its morality, and the conditions under which the population lived. In particular, details were offered on the sanitary conditions, the available resources, and the state of the buildings.1 The report, despite being a rather uninspiring read, is an important artefact in Canada’s history of centralizing rule over indigenous populations.
However, what makes it the starting point for this study is that all of these details are framed around the spatial designation of the district. The knowledge of indigenous populations, where they live, where they hunt, and their resources, is studied, recorded, and encoded within the designation of districts. This is not unique to Canada. A researcher conversant with the records of the colonial office will quickly note that its archives are awash with reports on districts plucked from the various corners of the British colonial empire. District reports can be found on Colonial India, colonial projects in Africa, New Spain, and the East Indian Company.
Though it extends outside the scope of this study, the district makes a sustained appearance at the close of the eighteenth century in Jeremy Bentham’s initial plan for the New Poor Law System in England. In his 1787 writings, Bentham proposed dividing England and Wales into 200 districts, each a perfect square of 225 miles. Doing this would district to optimize the management of the poor laws and “put everything at all times under the eye of persons of all ranks on whom management depends”.2 The salience of the district to organizing early nineteenth-century relations of rule is easily overlooked as our experience today with district as a form of spatial designation and administration is shot through by many banal iterations: school districts, electoral districts, shopping districts, etc.
I claim in this book through that the historical emergence of the district was central to a new ordering of colonial knowledge of rule. In particular, the district supported a new form of knowledge, a knowledge of human life as a population that could be delimited, controlled, classified, and managed in relation to a delimited milieu. As I will demonstrate, the forms of information that populated the Indian Agent’s report on Williams Lake district did not originate with the Department of Indian Affairs. Rather, we can trace the knowledge and form of inspection that underpins early twentieth-century colonial reports in Canada to the nineteenth-century district reports produced by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).
As such, the central focus of this book is the lineage of the HBC district report in structuring forms of knowledge and regimes of surveillance that became central to the company’s knowledge and control over indigenous people in British North America. In developing this lineage, I pursue three theses.
The first thesis is that the emergence of the district as social field of inspection radically reshaped how colonial knowledge captured and represented human beings. As I demonstrate in Chapter 2, up until the close of the eighteenth-century human life remained captured in a register that focused on typologies and generalized attributes furnished by the Linnaean system of classification. This system of classification was produced from a conduct to observe grounded in physico-theology that encouraged the practice of observing people and nature to gather meticulous details and reveal God in nature. Throughout the eighteenth century, this conduct to observe produced a form of knowledge that sought to understand human life in set typologies. These typologies put limits on the historical appearance of population as an object of rule. I suggest these epistemological limits can be found in Thomas Malthus’ text on population.
Far from displacing this conduct to observe, the rise of the district allowed the eighteenth-century categories of observation to be refined into standardized modes of inspection. It is these modes of inspection, organized at the level of the district, allowed registers to emerge that captured indigenous people as both individualized subjects and as populations. Tracing the emergence of the district and biopolitical knowledge back to a religious conduct to observe forces us to confront the role religion should play in our readings of biopolitics and governmentality. I argue that the district emerged as part of this conduct to observe but also served to mould an excess of details into knowledge of people, land, and things as a milieu. This milieu became a key way to target humans as economic subjects and rule them through biopolitical forces.
The second thesis is that the district report was integral to a shift in the gaze of sovereign power from the eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century. Reviell Netz
has argued that by the nineteenth century, colonial power had shifted from headquarter sites over lines of trade, mountain passes, and harbours and became a gridded field of view exercised over “area”. Michel Foucault theorized similarly that power shifted from a relation to land to that of territory. Unlike land, territory operated as a field of rule that comprised subjects, resources, and topography. As a process of intrication among land, people, and things, this new relation of power eventually became inextricable from population as a target of rule.
My claim is simply that these transformations in power were contingent upon new regimes of documentation that developed as HBC colonial administrators sought to impose a reliable, permanent, and consistent field of view over subject populations, economic resources, and geography. In Rupert’s Land, the district report was a form of documentation that enhanced the capacity of the HBC to use details and information captured in these reports to further its rule over its servants and indigenous populations. Thus, if we want to understand the inversion of the field of power and the shift of sovereign power from the violence of the sword to the administration of life, we must examine the district report as a technique of documentation that was inseparable from modern colonial rule. I develop the place of the district in this transformation of rule in Chapters 3 and 4 of the project. Chapter 3 focuses on the role the fort played in supporting HBC rule during the eighteenth century and how ruling from the fort conditioned a spatial field of rule centred on rivers, roads, and other arteries of trade. Chapter 4 focuses on the transformation of the fort from a headquarter site of power to that of a post, a nodal point responsible for bringing the district into view as a consistent field of rule.
The third thesis is that the deployment of the district in Rupert’s Land affords insight into the sedimentation of historical geographies of colonial rule in British North America. To date the focus has been framed as a modern form of colonial rule shaped by projects of systematic and forced dispossession, the making of white settler space and native space, as Colin Harris has framed it and a pre-modern commercial order of the HBC. A study of ruling through districts directs us towards the colonial spatial orders that emerged before the consolidation of rule under the Canadian state. In particular, I stress that the creation of a system of districts shifted the rule of the company way from the colonial fort towards an even and continuous field of rule. In my conclusion, I suggest that the geography of rule that emerged in Canada and elsewhere relied heavily on the district to create the knowledge for a new social and economic order. In this sense, the district report was at the vanguard in reshaping land to support modern relations of state rule throughout the nineteenth century.
Footnotes
1
1900, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs (Ottawa: Queen’s Press).
2
J. Bentham, Collective Works of Jeremy Bentham: Writing on the Poor Laws vol. 1, ed. Michael Quinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1796]), 204.