The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) has revamped its website. The new website is far more attractive than its predecessor, which was starting to look a bit dated. Some of the biographies now include images, which brings the DCB in line with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Users can also share biographies via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Moreover, the DCB is still free to users, unlike the ODNB.
Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail has published an interesting piece on the state of the Canadian political science profession. He argues that political scientists have dropped out of the national debate. Martin’s piece was especially interesting to me because he focuses on the politics department at Queen’s, my old alma mater, as case study of what went wrong.
There was a time when Canada’s scholars played a more prominent role in national political debates. Queen’s University, for example, had such names as John Meisel, George Perlin, Hugh Thorburn and Richard Simeon. They were voices of influence.
Today, although Ned Franks remains at large as a professor emeritus, that kind of firepower no longer exists at Queen’s or elsewhere. Donald Savoie, who specializes in governance issues at the University of Moncton, points out that academics have become less and less interested in our politics and our institutions, leaving journalists to hold governments to account.
Martin also quotes my former colleague Stephen Azzi.
What Martin says about political scientists is largely true. Moreover, it can be applied with at least equal force to other social scientists as well. Fifty years ago, historians such as Arthur Lower and Donald Creighton appeared in the popular press in addition to writing academic books. Most historians of Canada today do not engage with the public in the same way.
However, there are some exceptions to the lamentable trend documented by Martin. There are indeed (relatively) young academics who also work at public intellectuals. Consider Stephen Azzi of Carleton and Emmett Macfarlane at Waterloo. Sean Kheraj’s podcasts are listened to by non-academics and non-academics read Christopher Dummitt’s excellent Canadian history blog. I would also say that the ActiveHistory.ca website has helped to showcase academic research to the general public. Academics aren’t quite as insular as Martin implies.
The annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association starts today in Victoria, British Columbia. Sadly, I’m not going to be there, although I certainly hope to be at all future CHA conferences. Tom Peace has published an excellent blog post in which he analyses the keywords in paper titles to give us a sense of the topics that historians of Canada are working on right now.
In my view, the most interesting part of the Peace’s post was the information about the time periods covered by the papers. As you can see, the focus of Canadian historians is now on relatively recent periods of history.
Dates Mentioned in CHA Papers, 2004-2013
My former colleague, Mark Kuhlberg of Laurentian University’s History Department, has published a paper on the history of the Canadian pulp and paper industry. See “An Accomplished History, An Uncertain Future: Canada’s Pulp and Paper Industry Since the Early 1800s” in Juha-Antti Lamberg et al., ed, The Evolution of Global Paper Industry, 1800-2050 A Comparative Analysis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012).
My central research interest is the history of capitalism. In the last few years, there has been a resurgence in interest in capitalism in US history departments. (The New York Times recently did a piece on the New Business History). Judging from the program of this year’s Canadian Historical Association conference, it appears that something similar may be going on in Canadian universities.
There is a panel on Histories of Capitalism / Histoires du capitalisme
Facilitator/ Animateur : J. Andrew Ross (Guelph)
Don Nerbas (Cape Breton): Politics from Above: Big Business, the State, and Canadian Democracy
Kurt Korneski (Memorial): Development and Diplomacy: The Lobster Controversy on Newfoundland’s French Shore, 1890-1904.
Daniel Simeone (McGill): Acts of Bankruptcy: The Bankrupt Trader of mid-19th century Montreal
Moreover, there are some papers in other sessions that deal with the history of capitalism. They include:
Derek Murray (UVic): “Envisioning a Rural Landscape: Settlers, Bureaucrats, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Ontario”
Marc-André Gagnon (Guelph): “Harmoniser le Travail et le Capital: retour sur l’expérience des Chevaliers du travail montréalais en politique fédérale, 1885-1896”
Gene Allen (Ryerson): “An “unyielding, uncompromising attitude”: Breaking the Guild at Canadian Press, 1950-53”
James Opp (Carleton): “History as Image: The Hudson’s Bay Company, Modern Marketing, and the Visual Past”
Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to attend the CHA this year. However, I hope to read these papers when they are published.
Readers of this blog will know that lobbying by business is an issue that runs through much of my historical research. Indeed, my first book was on the role of corporate lobbying in the creation of the Canadian nation-state in 1867. (Creating a whole government you can then lobby for subsidies is a sort of meta-lobbying). There are many good reasons to restrict lobbying by businesses. One of them is that if firms can enrich themselves by lobbying, they will devote resources to lobbying rather than more socially productive forms of investment, such as R&D or building new factories to produce, you know, actual useful goods.
United Republic, which is a think-tank in Washington, recently published a study of the rate of return on lobbying versus other investments. They found that the ROI is, in some cases, extremely high. In other words, you will get much greater bang for your buck if you put your money into hiring K-Street lobbyists rather than doing something mundane, like buying a stock market index fund or building a house you plan to rent out.
Let’s think about the graphic above. The astonishingly high ex post rate of return to expenditure on lobbying raises the question of why anybody would ever bother investing in something that wasn’t lobbying. If the figures in this chart are both accurate and statistically representative of the ROI on all lobbying expenditures in recent history, then it become difficult to account for the existence of venture capitalists who put money into Silicon Valley or building new apartment buildings. That’s why I just don’t buy United Republic’s numbers.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sympathetic to United Republic’s desire to restrict the influence of corporate lobbyists. However, I think that they may have cherry-picked the data here by only including the cases when companies spent a little bit of money on lobbying and then received a massive payout. I’m certain there are examples of companies spending a loads on lobbying and then not getting what they wanted at all.
Corporate lobbying is an important issue. However, publishing media bait and highly suspect social science isn’t going to bring us any closer to a real solution.
Read more here.
Funding cuts to and the reorganization of libraries and archives have been in the news on both sides of the Atlantic recently. In Ottawa, the Library and Archives saga continues to unfold. In the UK, it appears that austerity is having its greatest impact on those historical researchers who use local archives. The premier national institutions, the British Library and the National Archives in Kew, appear to have been spared the worst of the cuts, perhaps because the British government wants visiting researchers from overseas to have a good impression of the UK. However, many of the local archives have responded to reductions in their subsidies by increasing the fees they charge for photocopying and digital cameras.
Yesterday, The Guardian ran an interesting story about these funding cuts. Researchers have noted that photocopying charges and digital camera permits vary considerably from one local archive to another. I’ve certainly noticed major discrepancies in the cost of photocopying a page, which clearly suggests that some of the archives are charging well above cost. (After all, the cost of toner and photocopy paper is pretty uniform). The costs of digital camera permits vary even more considerably.
Day passes are issued for users to photograph documents to transcribe later from home or university. These can vary in price from £2 at Birmingham to £25 at North Yorkshire County Record Office. Berkshire Record Office charges £1 per image and for those needing access to long documents, the cost can become prohibitive.
You can read more about this important issue here.
In February, OUP Canada published Professor Neville Thompson’s Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London.
From 1936 to 1960, Toronto-born British MP Beverley Baxter reported on events in Britain in a column in Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly news magazine. Baxter’s columns were an important source of information about Britain at a time when most English-speaking Canadians still strongly identified with the mother country. Baxter was well positioned to write about British politics, as he wasn’t just an MP– he was close to Lord Beaverbrook and knew Churchill. Baxter’s career in London and impact on Canadian perceptions of the UK are therefore important historical topics. The decision of Canada’s current government to revive symbols of the Empire/Commonwealth has also caused some Canadians to think about, and debate, the historical relationship between Canada and the United Kingdom. It is not surprising, therefore, that Thompson’s book has generated interest in the Canadian media. For instance, the Hill Times, a publication for political insiders in Ottawa, recently ran a story about it.
On 10 May, The Times Literary Supplement published a favourable review of the book by Nathan Greenfield. Greenfield noted that Baxter’s columns assumed a fairly extensive knowledge of British history and literature on the part of his readers, “many of whom were in small towns and whistlestop villages across Canada.” Greenfield seems mildly astonished that there was a time when the average English-speaking Canadian could have been assumed to know who Pitt, Drake, and Dickens.
Greenfield’s observation prompted a letter from a reader who recalled that British history and literature were once staples of the curriculum in one-schools in rural Canada.
(I can’t include direct links to Greenfield’s piece and the letter it generated, thanks to the TLS paywall. However, this link will take you the login page).
That’s the title of a new post by Dr Stephanie Decker over on the NEP-HIS blog. Decker points out that Africa has been particularly under-studied by business historians, in part because of a shortage of archival materials. Decker writes:
With perhaps the exception of South Africa, it is difficult for students of African business to write an archivally based history of business without traveling internationally.
Johannesburg’s CBD
Decker’s post got me thinking about other topics, regions, and countries that are understudied by business historians. Many, but not all, of these countries are in the developing world. I suspect that if we were to do a bibliometric survey of business-historical literature and then compare it to, say, the populations of various countries, we would find that Britain and the United States have been reasonably well studied. (Obviously there is plenty of additional valuable work to be done. No country’s business history will ever be exhaustively researched). Africa, on the other hand, is clearly under-studied. I’m not certain how Canada would fit into this picture. Canada’s population is roughly half that of the UK but the number of historians of Canadian business in proportionately small. Canada lacks organizations similar to the UK’s Business Archives Council and the Association of Business Historians. [Recently a small organization of Canadian business historians was launched. It is a great initiative but it is much smaller in scale than the ABH]. In the UK, substantial numbers of business historians are trained at the Universities of Glasgow and Reading. There aren’t equivalent programmes in Canada. As a result, there are just a handful of scholars working on Canadian business history. The existing state of affairs is hard to justify, given that Canada is a rich country with lots of universities, lots of historians, and a great network of archives.
All of this raises the question of what business history is good for. Why is it important for a society to know about its economic past? How does Joe Taxpayer, the person who pays for all of this research, benefit from the study of business history?
Personally, I think that business history is very important. It can inform public policy, improve decision-making within firms, and advance our overall understanding of how societies have evolved. It is valuable in developed countries and is probably even more important in nations that are still in the process of developing their institutions.
The Past Speaks 