The subtitle of Laura Ishiguro's fine Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia identifies almost all the key terms at play in its intricately interconnected argument, while its main title plays wonderfully with expectations, riskily suggesting banality when the work is anything but. There is very much to write about here, including Ishiguro's fundamental assertion, that the construction of the “everyday” can have long-standing historical, racial, political, and economic consequences. Unlike much existing work on the historical roots of settler colonialism in Canada, which takes race and Indigenous-settler relations as its primary concerns (4), Ishiguro examines thousands of archived family letters sent between British settlers in the territory that would come to be called British Columbia, Canada, and the British imperial metropole. Prompted by these letters’ almost complete silence about Indigenous people, Ishiguro asks what might be gleaned by examining the interplay between the letters’ content and their erasures. The deep and diverse analysis that ensues offers crucial insights into the processes by which Britons transformed themselves into settlers and colonizers, Britons’ personal priorities and the capacity of these priorities to refract broader colonial ideologies, and the processes by which Britons in British Columbia came to take their power, prospects, comfort, and belonging for granted (7).

Ishiguro structures her argument carefully, establishing persuasive connections amongst the multiple terms of her study and consistently grounding her claims in detailed examples of archived correspondence, enabling the argument's subtleties to build in force over the course of the book. She begins with a review of imperial postal reform at the end of the nineteenth century, reiterating its importance to the making of a modern liberal state in Britain and focusing particularly on how the post facilitated colonial governance and the extension of British commerce around the world. Ishiguro is specifically interested, of course, in the latter dynamics as they relate to British Columbia and firmly establishes the extent to which “trans-imperial families”—her term for families with members in the British metropole and in at least one location across the British Empire (9–10)—depended on postal systems to maintain affective bonds. The next chapter closely examines individual letters, demonstrating how frequently they incorporate distance as an explicitly new feature of shared family life, frame letters themselves as material evidence of connection, and navigate discrepancies between metropolitan and settler social mores. This deft epistolary work, Ishiguro argues, was fundamental in sustaining and developing the trans-imperial families that colonial and settler work required and created.

The book's second part extends the argument by examining the perhaps surprising discrepancy between initial letters from British Columbia, which often expressed their writers’ heightened emotions at new experiences in unfamiliar locations, and most subsequent letters, which describe boredom, monotony, and banality instead. Here, Ishiguro explicitly reads for the feelings that correspondents claimed, not against the grain for suppressed emotion, proposing that such a reading enables new histories of emotion, empire, and settler colonialism (96–97). Accurately identifying expressions of monotony or banality as epistolary convention, Ishiguro uses scholarship on boredom to support her claims that these descriptions are “powerful productions of knowledge” (112). Because the letters are almost entirely silent on topics related to settler vulnerability or Indigenous people and their lives, Ishiguro understands them as potent mechanisms by which writers and recipients were invited to imagine places like British Columbia as normal, potential, or future homes (112–19). A subsequent chapter, focused specifically on the letters’ frequent descriptions of food acquisition and food preparation, deepens the argument, noting that—while a great many of the letters make explicit comparisons to, or contrasts with, food practices in Britain—almost none are framed in relation to Indigenous food practices (145–46).

Ishiguro shifts expertly among critical lenses throughout the book, demonstrating her thorough understanding of epistolary genres and subgenres especially well in the first chapter of “Family Faultlines,” the book's third and final part. There, after detailing the era's letter-writing conventions regarding notifications of death and expressions of condolence, and its cultural ideas about death and good deaths, Ishiguro examines how particular families used letters to navigate, trans-imperially, the facts of bereavement, expectations of collective mourning, burial plans, inheritances, and the changes to family membership that deaths sometimes entailed. She concludes the chapter by underscoring the fact that—despite these letters’ preoccupation with the deaths of British family members—they are steadfastly silent about the devastating mortality rates in Indigenous communities of British Columbia (180).

The book's final chapter specifically analyzes silence, omission, and deflection, examining what Ishiguro calls “extra-familial epistolary gossip” (183) about the fifty-year marriage of Michael Phillipps, a British settler conventionally commemorated as a quintessential pioneer and builder of the Kootenay region, and Rowena David, a member of a powerful Ktunaxa Nation family. Several generations of David-Phillipps family records were donated to the Ktunaxa Nation's Archives in 2015 to mark the family's deep rootedness in the Ktunaxa Nation, but they had not yet been opened for research when Ishiguro was completing her work (186). She therefore shifts her methodology to read closely for peripheral mentions of the family in others’ correspondence instead. By juxtaposing other writers’ gossip about the David-Phillipps marriage with Phillipps's own epistolary silence, Ishiguro locates what she calls “the limits of intimacy at the heart of family correspondence” (208), effectively reminding readers of the structural biases of colonial archives, instantiating the painstaking work of reading for the significance of silences, and demonstrating the resonant scholarly potential of studying white British families and interracial families simultaneously, bringing families of origin and families of marriage into the same analytic frame.

Throughout this superb study, Ishiguro argues that any efforts to address the “settler problem” in Canada must contend with how the past has determined who gets to take for granted their role, comfort, power, and belonging. As she convincingly demonstrates, trans-imperial family letters offer nuanced insights into how the apparently banal “everyday” of settler colonialism laid the foundations for that belonging in British Columbia.