History of Canadian Business, New edition (Carleton Library Series, 207)

by R.T. Naylor

R.T. Naylor traces the insidious interplay of big business and big government in Canada in the period between Confederation and World War I, presenting corruption as the norm rather than an abberation. He tells the often sordid story of the emergence and development of corporate capitalism in Canada during the country's formative years, exposing an epidemic of white-collar crime among the country's elite financial institutions and locating the origins of the modern corporate-welfare state in tax concessions and subsidies. A controversial study that went against the prevailing views of its time, some lauded its publication as an intellectual breakthrough, while others condemned it as a political rant. An unprecedented work in Canadian historiography, "History of Canadian Business" has been chosen by the Social Sciences Federation of Canada as one of the twenty most outstanding works in the field in the last half of the twentieth century.

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Laurent Carbonneau]

I will cop off the top that I did not read this cover to cover - it was for research for a book project - but this is a strong contribution to the corpus of Canadian economic history doorstops, with a strong development/dependency lens and a focus on the machinations and fractures of capital that sets it apart from liberal business history and more straightforwardly Marxist analysis. Particularly excellent in its treatment of post-Confederation development, the railways, the National Policy and the turn-0f-the-century economy.