Sandwell, R. W.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

506 Histoire sociale 1Social HistoryToday, governments remain tom over policies of liberalization and moderation,proving Campbell's assertion that liquor "control is still as important as profit"(p. 192).ln many ways the essays in Drink in Canada reflect the diversity of research onthe history of alcohol, summarized by Pamela McKenzie's thematic bibliographyat the book's conclusion. It is still a very young field of inquiry, and Warsh's richcollection reflects the quality of social history already produced by scholars withinil. The historians represented here have succeeded in explaining Canadians' ambiva-lent relationship with alcohol. 1 highly recommend this book as a valuable contribu-tion to the burgeoning historiography of drink in Canada.Susan NeylanUniversity of British ColumbiaKris Inwood, ed. - Farm, Factory and Fortune: New Studies in the EconomicHistory ofthe Maritime Provinces. Fredericton, N.B.: Acadiensis P~ess, 1993. Pp.viii,274ln these times when fragmentation, deconstruction, and post-modernism are threat-ening the tranquillity of academic pursuits, it is comforting to reflect on the greathistorical debates of earlier and (for many historians) happier times. One of thegreat traditions of Western history has been the periodic emergence of a single issuearound which historians' diverse interests could coalesce - the formulation of asingle question whose answer, for a time at least, seemed essential to understandingan entire national or even international history. British historians argued for decadesover the standard of living during industrialization before turning their attention tothe troubling question of why Britain had no revolution in 1848. French historiansworried for years over the question "Which class started the Revolution?", whileGerman historians have been obsessed with "What happened to pervert our liberaltradition?" Although it is difficult to discover a definitive national debate in Canada,those from "the regions" have been united in their apparent diversity by the singlequestion, itself a distinctively Canadian derivative of modernization theory, "Whydidn't we turn out like Ontario?"The calming effect of these single-question issues has, like the clarity andcoherence of much of the research they spawned, been seriously disrupted by theinternational collapse of functionalist systems and positivist ideology. Over the pastdecade, as Giovanni Levi summarizes, "what has been called into question is theidea of a regular progression through a uniform and predictable series of stages inwhich social agents were considered to align themselves in conformity withsolidarities and conflicts that were in sorne sense given, natural and inevitable"("On Microhistory" in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing,Penn State University Press, 1992, p. 94). The essays in Farm, Factory andFortune suggest that, while social historians may be writhing under crumblingmonolithic explanations and destabilized structures of meaning, Canadian economicComptes rendus 1 Book Reviews 507history continues to provide a safe haven in an otherwise turbulent intellectualworld.Noting once again the "slow growth" of the Maritime economy in the laternineteenth and early twentieth centuries, editor Kris Inwood has brought togethereleven papers that "may be read as a collective investigation of regional underde-velopment during the formative years" of Maritime history (p. vii). Despite theinclusion of the word "new" in the subtitle, most of the essays in this collection arereprinted from issues of Acadiensis and furthermore constitute familiar cogs in thewell-worn but intricate machinery of Maritime economic history. Readers are notasked to deal with "new" questions surrounding the social construction of "primary"sources, the legitimacy of social science methodology, the ideological premises ofeconornic theory, nor, with sorne notable exceptions, the plurality of either behav-iours or interpretations. Instead, the majority of articles in the collection invite thereader to participate in the creation of a new consensus about the old question:"Why didn't the Maritimes develop like Ontario?"This time-tested approach to Maritime economic history has provided the frame-work for sorne impressive research and analysis. Ken Cruikshank takes issue withhistorians such as E. R. Forbes and T. W. Acheson (against whose arguments manyof the articles in this book are directed) and provides evidence' from theIntercolonial Railway that high freight rates did not inhibit "normal" developmentin the Maritimes. In a similar vein Gregory Marchildon modifies conclusions thatthe financial activities of Max Aitken, R. Stairs, and the Scotia Group were causalfactors in the region's industrial decline. In their detailed study, Quigley, Drum-mond, and Evans compare the savings and loans behaviour of the Bank of NovaScotia and the Royal Bank across Canada to argue against regional discriminationin the Maritimes and to deny any "causal link between the policies of Canadianbanks and the economic problems of the Maritime Provinces"(p. 219).Marilyn Gerriets demonstrates that the General Mining Association of Britaincompany created high prices for coal that inhibited industrialization, but she entersinto the general spirit of the collection by arguing that Maritime historians shouldbe cautious about where they lay the blame for economic inferiority: "the events ofhistory have denied us the opportunity of knowing with certainty whether NovaScotia had the potential to become more highly industrialized"(p. 92). Only E. R.Forbes, in the last essay in the collection, makes a clear case for the active role ofthe federal government in intensifying poverty in the Maritimes. He argues that thefederal policy of matching grants in the 1930s was relatively disadvantageous to theMaritime provinces, whose already overburdened municipal and provincial govern-ments were unwilling to increase their contribution to relief programmes.In his essay "Maritime Industrialization from 1870 to 1910", Kris Inwoodreopens an older debate by providing new evidence that the industrial decline inpost-Confederation Maritime Canada can be explained by reference to the exigen-cies of a staples economy and the search of Maritime capitalists for better capitalreturns. In a second essay, Inwoodjoins James Irwin to examine regional disparitiesby using detailed calculations from census data to calculate commodity incomes ina variety of sectors in different regions before Confederation. Their research508 Histoire sociale / Social Historysuggests that Maritime incomes, based on agriculture, fishing, mining, and lumber-ing, were lower than those in Ontario, where agriculture provided a higher income.Like Cruikshank and Marchildon, they suggest that the "problems" of MaritimeCanada cannot be traced to Confederation.It is in the essays dealing with the pre-industrial rural economy that this bookcornes closest to fulfilling the promise of its subtitle. By emphasizing the role ofrural economies, the editor is broadening the scope of economic history, which has,as he points out in the introduction, been dominated by urban and industrial eco-nomic formations. A. R. MacNeillooks at the benefits accruing to settlers who lookup land in Annapolis Township and offers compelling evidence that New Englandsettlers benefited from the earlier improvements and livestock of exiled Acadians.Béatrice Craig and T. W. Acheson look at colonial New Brunswick, both arguingthat the polarities provided by the traditional historiography - self-sufficiency vs.market orientation, farmer vs. logger - do not do justice to the economy of NewBrunswick in the nineteenth century. They argue that the rural economy was acomplex one, based on a shifting economy of wage labour, commercial farming,and subsistence agriculture that changed according to historically and geographicallyspecific variables.Outside of a few nods in the direction of household or informaI economies, thecategories used to define social and economic change throughout this collection -productivity, wealth, development, progress, income, employment, industry - areuntroubled by the scrutiny that scholars in other disciplines are bringing to these"naturalized" categories of social analysis. This is brought home with particularforce in D. A. Muise's detailed study of women's role in the paid workforce inthree different areas of Nova Scotia. The author raises a number of importantquestions around the anomalous relation of women to industrial capitalism. Thediscovery of the gender-specific nature of women's employment, like its age-specificity and low pay, will come as no surprise to most historians, but it isinteresting to see international patterns worked out in the varied contexts of Mari-time Canada. Willing as Muise is to include women as active participants inMaritime industrialization, however, he ultimately fails to explain either the reasonsfor the disjuncture between men and women's industrial participation or its effecton the regional economy. The explanatory concept of "cultural norms" only obfus-cates the deeper links between gender, neoclassical economic discourse, andindustrialization that are being explored elsewhere by historians like Alice Kessler-Harris, economists like Nancy Folbre and Marjorie Cohen, and political theoristslike Carole Pateman. As a result, women, like so many Maritimers throughout thiscollection of essays, continueto sit awkwardly on the margin of "economic"behaviour, the significance of their lives and work eclipsed by an economic ideolo-gy tbat privileges markets, paid work, and the structures of formaI economicdevelopment.Scholars will find this collection a stimulating addition to the ongoing debateabout economic development in the Maritime provinces. This reader, however, isleft wondering how long it will be before Canadian economic historians notice thepolitical and ontological implications of their research and address the issues ofComptes rendus 1 Book Reviews 509gender, power, and academic legitimacy that lie deep in the heart of economichistory. Until then, they will no doubt continue their impressive scholarly analysesof the interesting question: Why is it, again, that we are not like Ontario?R .W. SandweUSimon Fraser UniversityDuffin, Jacalyn - Langstaff: A Nineteenth Century Medical Life. Toronto: Uni-versity of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. vii, 383.The story of Dr. James Miles Langstaff fills a void in scholarly Canadian medicalhistory. The Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine's biographical series,"Canadian Medical Lives", has in most cases narrated the triumph of medicalscience through accounts of the contlibutions of important and weU-known medicalpersonnel. Most other studies of medical practice in Canada have examined largegroups of medical practitioners. Standing in sharp methodological contrast toprevious historical works, Jacalyn Duffin's study of a typical country physician ofthe mid-nineteenth century contributes greatly to our understanding of generalmedical practice.Through systematic analysis of Langstaffs casebooks for information aboutdiagnosis, therapy, and medical opinion, Duffin is able to measure his reaction toinnovations and events concerning the medical community of Ontario: medicaleducation, political issues, public health, and legislation. Judging from this doctor,country practice was not necessarily static or "backward". Langstaff kept weUabreast of medical innovation. Moreover, he formulated hypotheses about therelationship between symptom and disease based on his own clinical observationsand experience. Both he and his spouses took on causes for social reform outsidethe realm of medicine. As a result, Duffin's book contlibutes to Canadianhistoriography not only as medical biography, but as social history of medicine.The therapeutic perspective the book provides is weU integrated into sections onobstetrics, surgery, infectious diseases, and the doctor's attitude toward addictionand mental health. Duffin combines a Rosenbergian definition of therapeutics,which includes bedside manner, counselling, and generaUy acting as "confessor",with a Warnerian perspective, that of actual clinical practice. She determines that"Langstaff recognized the importance of psychological support for his patients, buthe also relied ... on drugs, bleeding, blisters, and other matelial treatments in aUdecades of his practice" (p. 91). The doctor seems to have displayed surprisinglylittle therapeutic nihilism, untypical of his period, except when he was unused toperforming a new procedure. He balked at doing risky internai and abdominaloperations, for example, more than the superficial, external ones (pp. 176, 254). Hedid become more sceptical of new therapeutics later in his career, however, possiblybecause the novelty of new drugs had worn off.In spite ofthese clinical reservations, Langstaff's therapy was the most innovativeand least static aspect of his practice. If the continued presence of old drugs in his

Kris Inwood, ed. - Farm, Factory and Fortune: New Studies in
the Economie History of the Maritime Provinces

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Kris Inwood, ed. - Farm, Factory and Fortune: New Studies in the Economie History of the Maritime Provinces

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)