Daniel Clayton here reviews a series of encounters by explorers, traders, and politicians with the territory and native people of Vancouver Island in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The book is divided into three parts - Spaces of European Exploration; Geographies of Capital; and Circulating Knowledge and Power. Each section examines the ways in which natives and Westerners were positioned in these phases of exploration, trade and imperial aggrandizement and chart how native and Western interests and fortunes became intertwined and then later diverged as Vancouver Island was fashioned as imperial space.