In early 2010, a group of business and economic historians gathered in Kitchener-Waterloo to present papers and to discuss “Smart Globalization: The Canadian Business and Economic History Experience.”

Globalization has been a part of Canada’s business and economic history since the first interaction between European traders and Indigenous peoples. This book focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the post–Second World War period – both important periods in the history of the globalization of business. The book is a starting point, not an end point, and it is hoped that in the future there will be more...

What is globalization and how do we understand it in a Canadian context? Globalization has become one of the most commonly used and contentious terms in recent popular, political, and academic discourse. From civil society groups, to economists, to international diplomats to laid-off factory workers, the wordglobalizationhas a diversity of meanings. For Canadians, globalization has simultaneously represented economic opportunity and economic uncertainty; it has taken the form of mercantilism, continentalism, and other forces; it has become synonymous with global communications interconnectivity and deindustrialization; it has been condemned for fostering cultural homogeneity, while creating a global village of cultural...

In the spring of 1910, the premier of Ontario, J.P. Whitney, was celebrating. Canada’s attorney general, A.B. Aylesworth, had recently announced the rejection of a petition by the Canadian Privy Council to disallow an act staying court cases challenging contracts recently signed between municipalities and Ontario’s publically owned Hydro-Electric Power Commission.¹ Whitney’s government had established the commission in 1906, and, under the leadership of Adam Beck, it sought to distribute electrical power generated at Niagara Falls cheaply throughout Southern and Western Ontario.² This had brought the government of Ontario into conflict with financial interests in Canada and in the City...

Ha-Joon Chang and Dani Rodrik demonstrate the degree to which conscious decisions to pursue the policy of “smart” or “selective” globalization were, in large part, responsible for the prosperity attained by today’s First World nations. These countries charted a “middle way” between the extremes of unrestricted free trade and an autarkic system. Instead, these nations retained those barriers to the free movement of workers, capital, and goods that they saw as beneficial and jettisoned others. It is against the retention of such barriers that the neoliberals and World Trade Organization (WTO) have been fighting for years, and one of the...

InUnderstanding Globalization, Robert Schaeffer states that the practice of selective globalization emerged at the end of the Cold War and the onset of the debt crisis in the developing world.¹ As Smith and Anastakis point out in the introduction to this collection, Canada has long practised a form of smart or selective globalization at odds with the neoliberal teachings embodied in the Washington Consensus. Canada used interventionist and protectionist policies to encourage development and attract foreign capital. Normally, the Canadian economy operates in what William Coleman and Michael Atkinson describe as a “firm-centred industry culture” amenable to business and...

The nineteenth-century drop in transportation costs fuelled trade expansion and a wave of globalization rooted in the demand for primary product exports that were inputs into the urbanizing industrial centres of the Atlantic economy. During this era of globalization, the successful development of many of the high-income countries of today, such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, was based on the exploitation and export of abundant natural resources, such as fish, fur, timber, gold, grain, coal, and oil.¹ In contrast to this historical experience, resource-abundant economies during the recent era of globalization remain dependent on their resource...

At first glance, the growth of Canada’s cotton mills in the nineteenth century would appear to provide little if any support for Ha-Joon Chang’s “provocative” hypothesis, as Douglas Irwin has called it, that infant industry protection is the way the West grew rich. After all, the traditional view is that Canada’s cotton mills grew largely because of the National Policy tariff of 1879, and the cotton mills never outgrew their need for protection, remaining instead high cost and inefficient.¹ Little hard evidence, however, has been presented to back up this claim, inefficiency being largely inferred from the fact that the...

The implementation of the Canada-US Automotive Products Trade Agreement (Auto Pact) in 1965 recast the Canadian automotive industry, providing a framework for new sources of growth, the reverberations of which persist to the present.¹ This chapter considers the conditions and events predating its execution and argues that the growth and development of the automotive manufacturing industry subsequent to 1965 emerged from policy decisions and principles established decades before the first volume automobile producer began operating in Canada. During the period, Canada’s domestic policies, particularly its policies with respect to tariffs and trade, were shaped by three often competing preoccupations – imperialism,...

One morning in June 1964, a crowd consisting mostly of employees of Seagram Distillers (United Kingdom) and some local dignitaries assembled in the Scottish town of Paisley to celebrate the opening of the Chivas/Glen Keith Distillery, touted by the company’s public relations department as “the first new malt distillery built in Scotland since the Victorian Era.” The main speaker was, not surprisingly, Samuel Bronfman, the autocratic chief executive (and largest shareholder) of the parent company, Distillers Corporation-Seagram Ltd (DCSL), headquartered in Montreal, but with its largest operation – and its most architecturally outstanding building – in New York City. “It is noteworthy...

Why is it that Canadian beer brands and brewers do not have a significant global presence? After all, one would be hard pressed to think of a nation more naturally advantaged when it comes to brewing. The vast northern territory has all of the natural ingredients – barley, hops, and fresh water – necessary to manufacture a world-class beer. Furthermore, there is a legacy of commercial brewing in Canada that stretches back over three and a half centuries. Canada’s oldest and most successful brewers – Molson, Labatt, Carling, Sleeman, and Alexander Keith – began their operations earlier than most of the global firms that...