{"id":108,"date":"2015-08-17T17:58:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T21:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/3-2-industrialization-labour-historians\/"},"modified":"2020-07-21T19:47:24","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T23:47:24","slug":"3-2-industrialization-labour-historians","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/3-2-industrialization-labour-historians\/","title":{"raw":"3.2 Industrialization, Labour, and Historians","rendered":"3.2 Industrialization, Labour, and Historians"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_107\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Collage<\/a> Figure 3.8 Postcards like this one were a means to promote the industrial culture emerging in towns like Oshawa in 1910.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCanada was the first colony to industrialize, and it did so in the third quarter of the 19th century. Although well after Great Britain and Belgium, this was only a decade or so behind the United States, more or less contemporaneous with France, and well ahead of Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain,\u00a0and Russia. Prior to the 1970s, however, Canadian historians did not realize this. Instead, historians debated whether industrialization resulted from Sir John A. Macdonald\u2019s National Policy of 1879 or under the Laurier government at the turn of the century. Both sides attributed this late industrialization to an over-reliance on the export of staples: cod, furs, timber, and wheat. As the presumed centrality of political leaders in these narratives suggests, most historians considered industrialization to have been the result of federal government policy, rather than an organic maturation of settler colonialism.[footnote]The classic statement, which went through five editions by 1977, is Arthur R. M. Lower's\u00a0Colony to Nation: A History of Canada <\/em>(Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1946).[\/footnote]\u00a0Starting in the mid-1970s, two complimentary but distinct new schools of thought changed this historical debate.\r\n\r\nIn French Canada, influenced by the work of Stanley Ryerson,[footnote]Stanley B. Ryerson, Unequal Union: Roots of Crisis in the Canadas, 1815-1873 <\/em>(Toronto: Progress Books, 1968).[\/footnote]\u00a0researchers at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al pushed back the start date for industrialization in Montreal to the late 1840s when, harnessing the hydraulic power of the locks of the Lachine Canal, the first large-scale factories were built.[footnote]This idea formed the cornerstone for the highly influential interpretation of Quebec as a typical part of North America, a position first developed in Paul-Andr\u00e9 Linteau, Ren\u00e9 Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert, Histoire du Qu\u00e9bec Contemporain, Tome 1 De la Conf\u00e9deration \u00e0 la Crise (1867-1929)\u00a0<\/em>(Montreal: Bor\u00e9al Express, 1979).[\/footnote] From the outset, this new research stressed the importance of social history, itself a reflection of the turbulent debates (at that time) over the national question in Quebec. Strikes by journeymen shoemakers over the introduction of machine tools and by carters opposed to the Grand Trunk railway monopoly were depicted as challenging the new industrial order,[footnote]Joanne Burgess, \"L'industrie de la Chaussure \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al 1840-1870:\u00a0le Passage de l'Artisanat \u00e0 la Fabrique,\"\u00a0Revue d'Histoire de l'Am\u00e9rique Fran\u00e7aise,\u00a0<\/em>vol. 31, no. 2 (1977): 187-210; Margaret Heap, \"La Gr\u00e8ve des Charretiers \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al, 1864,\"\u00a0Revue d'Histoire de l'Am\u00e9rique Fran\u00e7aise,\u00a0<\/em>vol. 31, no. 4 (1977): 371-96.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/ins>while the dire living conditions for the emerging working class became a major focus of historical work.[footnote]Jean De Bonville,\u00a0Jean-Baptiste Gagnepetit: Les Travailleurs Montr\u00e9alais \u00e0 la Fin du XIXe Si\u00e8cle\u00a0<\/em>(Montreal: L'Aurore, 1975); Bettina Bradbury,\u00a0Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal\u00a0<\/em>(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993).[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/ins>Soon debates on method, particularly over how we should interpret census data, led to a considerably more nuanced view that challenged this early mis\u00e8rabiliste<\/i> literature;[footnote]Gilles Lauzon, \"Cohabitation et D\u00e9m\u00e9nagements en Milieu Ouvrier Montr\u00e9alais,\"Revue d'Histoire de l'Am\u00e9rique Fran\u00e7aise,\u00a0<\/em>vol. 46, no. 1 (1992): 115-42.[\/footnote] at the same time,\u00a0careful analysis of work processes demonstrated the significance of gender to understanding working class resistance.[footnote]Jacques Ferland, \"Syndicalisme Parcellaire et Syndicalisme Collectif: Une Interpretation Socio-Techniques des Conflits Ouvriers dans Deux Industries Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coises (1880-1914),\"\u00a0Labour\/Le Travail,\u00a0<\/em>19 (1987): 48-88.[\/footnote]\u00a0More recent work has shown both substantial inter-generational social mobility, most strikingly among Irish Catholics, and a serious deterioration in the status of women.[footnote]Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton,\u00a0Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840-1900<\/em> (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011); Bettina Bradbury,\u00a0Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal\u00a0<\/em>(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).[\/footnote]\u00a0The focus has remained on Montreal, the financial and industrial capital of Canada until the 1930s, but detailed studies of moulders and iron workers in the Saint-Maurice Valley\u00a0and ship\u2019s labourers in Quebec City have shown how integrated 19th century labour markets were in North America.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, in English Canada, a group of graduate students interested in labour history built on the pioneering work of Manitoban\u00a0H. Claire Pentland (1914-78)\u00a0to chronicle the industrialization of Toronto and Hamilton in the 1860s and 1870s.[footnote]H. Clare Pentland's 1961 doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto was published 20 years later as\u00a0Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650-1860\u00a0<\/em>(Toronto: James Lorimer, 1981). The two most influential works by this group of scholars were Gregory S. Kealey,\u00a0Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867-1892<\/em> (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980) and Bryan D. Palmer,\u00a0A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860-1914\u00a0<\/em>(Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979).[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/ins>In 1975, these young scholars created their own journal, Labour<\/i>\/Le Travail<\/i>. Rejecting traditional, largely institutional, labour history and highly critical of quantitative historical sociology, these scholars focused on working class culture. They argued that skilled male craftsmen drew on a \u201cproducer ideology\u201d, which was highly critical of lawyers, merchants, middlemen and bankers, to\u00a0develop their own alternate view of the world. This critical stance was presented by historians as a powerful and potentially revolutionary defence of the working man, one that spoke out strongly against prevailing business values. Workers made their mark in various institutions and movements including the [pb_glossary id=\"795\"]Knights of Labor[\/pb_glossary] (which may have organized as many as one in five waged workers in Ontario during the 1880s), the struggle for a shorter working day, and print media \u2013 edited by \"brain workers.\"[footnote]Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer,\u00a0Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).[\/footnote]\u00a0The significance of class conflict in Ontario has since been questioned by the suggestion that, there,\u00a0industrialization was more a case of [pb_glossary id=\"796\"]craft capitalism[\/pb_glossary].[footnote]Robert B. Kristofferson, Craft Capitalism: Craftworkers a<\/i>nd\u00a0Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840-1872 <\/em>(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).[\/footnote]\u00a0More generally, the idea of a coherent working class culture has been challenged by the work of Ian McKay of Queen's University.\u00a0Initially he applied to the Maritimes the idea, developed by British historian\u00a0Raphael Samuel (1934-96), that industrialization was not a simple process of factories with machines replacing older ways of making things. Rather, it was a complex process involving both hand and machine tools in an uneven development characterized by a limited number of factories servicing numerous highly competitive workshops and manufacturers. This complexity meant no single working class experience was ever possible.\u00a0Indeed, this very diversity of experience contributed to the remarkable social stability of late-Victorian Canada, by impeding the growth of a shared sense of class.\u00a0A new coherent critique of industrial society did emerge, but only slowly and it never represented all or even most of the working class. Furthermore, it shared rather than challenged the positivist, masculinist and -- most importantly as Canada once more became a destination for immigrants --\u00a0racist ideas then dominant in bourgeois society.[footnote]Samuel's path-breaking analysis appeared as \"Workshop of the World,\"\u00a0History Workshop Journal,\u00a0<\/em>3 (1973): 3-61. McKay's analysis of work in the Maritimes began in his graduate studies and then appeared in several articles, the most important of which is \"Capital and Labour in the Halifax Baking and Confectionery Industry During the Last Half of the 19th Century,\"\u00a0Labour\/Le Travail<\/em>, 3 (1978): 63-108. His Macdonald Prize-winning analysis of working class politics is\u00a0Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and The People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920<\/em> (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2008).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMoving industrialization back a full generation or more changes how we conceive late 19th century Canada. Rather than a \u201cpeaceful kingdom\u201d taking a constitutional road to democracy that slowly industrialized under the guidance of wise political leaders, post-Confederation Canada is now seen as a country struggling with the serious social and economic problems of early industrial society. Confederation, the purchase of Rupert\u2019s Land, the numbered treaties, the Indian Act<\/em>, the M\u00e9tis rebellions, and the resettlement of both the Prairies and British Columbia are now seen in quite a different light. These events\u00a0were all parts of a complex process of remaking the northern half of North America into an industrial capitalist society.\r\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\r\n