by Mel Watkins
University of Toronto
Manitoba History, Number 4, 1982
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In 1961, the University of Toronto accepted Clare Pentland’s doctoral thesis in economic history titled “Labour and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in Canada.” It had been more than a decade in the making. Portions had appeared in published articles, notably in “The Development of a Capitalistic Labour Market in Canada” in the November 1959 issue of the then Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. The titles, both of the thesis and of the latter article, indicated the ambitious scope of Pentland’s work and also, and particularly for its time, its unorthodox cast; capitalism was, after all, itself a dirty word in the Cold War era.
As it happened, the thesis, notwithstanding its excellence. was not published. With the growing student radicalism of the 1960s. it was to become an underground classic for an emerging generation of new political economists and new labour historians. Inevitably, even understandably, there were suspicions that the thesis had been suppressed by publishers and the academic establishment, that it had never seen the light of bookstores because of its radical perspective. In fact, this was never so. Rather, by the early ‘70s, more than one publisher was pleading with Pentland to be allowed to publish it. The problem was Pentland’s reluctance, the product, one guesses, of the reticence, the modesty, the perfectionism, of this most talented scholar.
There was also, with the passage of time, his failing health. In 1978, only 64, Pentland died. Now, posthumously, his thesis is published for the wider audience it has always deserved. It is a tribute to its seminal quality that twenty years later with much scholarly water under the bridge. it reads with a real freshness. There is even a dividend from the long wait: an excellent introduction by Pentland’s colleague, Paul Phillips that, amongst other things, greatly facilitates the task of a reviewer.
How should we, from the perspective of today, situate this work? To do so. one can appeal not only to Phillip’s introduction but also to the earlier and thoughtful memorial to Pentland by labour historian Gregory Kealey in the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory in 1979, on which Phillips has some useful observations. Relevant questions are: how does Pentland’s work fit relative, firstly, to the so-called staples approach of Harold Innis, or the old political economy; secondly, to the new political economy, and specifically the controversial writing of Tom Naylor about Canada’s dependent industrialization; thirdly, to the new labour history and its substantial Marxist orientation as exemplified in particular in the writings of Kealey?
Kealey sees the Innis tradition, with its emphasis on staples and its disinterest in class, or at least in the working class, as of limited usefulness, and lauds Pentland, with his emphasis on industrialization and on class, for breaking with it. Phillips sees no such decisive break by Pentland, while it can be presumed (from other writings) that Phillips is more sympathetic than Kealey to the Innis tradition. There is some merit in both positions. Pentland did do pioneering work by focusing on industrialization proper, and the supply of labour thereto, that transcends the staple tradition. But he exaggerated the extent of industrialization and mis-specified the nature of Canadian capitalist development when he wrote that Canada made the transformation to a mature industrial economy. What needs to be explained is the actuality of incomplete industrialization, of industrialization that is linked to staples and takes place without altering the overall character of the economy as a staples economy. And precisely because the Canadian economy remains a staples economy in spite of industrialization, the Innis tradition remains relevant. In sum: Pentland’s work can be seen as substantially modifying but not destroying a staples approach.
Kealey, in his otherwise excellent book Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism 1867-1892, castigates Naylor and others of the new political economy persuasion (including myself) for, unlike Pentland, understating the extent of industrialization. But if not before 1892, certainly after 1892, under the rubric of what Kealey calls the transformation to monopoly capitalism. Canadian industry is increasingly cast into a branch plant, truncated, immature, dependent variety, exactly along the lines that Naylor and others are talking about. Phillips sees Pentland as in neither camp in the controversy that flourishes around Naylor; since it is Kealey that claims Pentland’s authority, this is a rebuke for the Kealey position.
The debate around both of these questions, being a debate about dependency, is really a debate about “the national question.” It is significant that Pentland was, as Phillips puts it, “a strong Canadian nationalist.” This is evident from an early point (Canadian Historical Review, 1967) in Pentland’s questioning of the virtues of foreign ownership and, even more heretically, of international unions; the latter position makes Pentland and the new labour historians with their typical a-nationalist, even anti-nationalist, bias. most uneasy bedfellows.
On the third question, there can be no real disagreement about the answer. Pentland is seen by Kealey and the other new Marxist labour historians as a most valued and significant predecessor. They are right to do so. Phillips makes the point that Pentland did not think of himself as a Marxist but that he did work out of a Marxist perspective. The new labour history is an important contribution to Canadian scholarship. It is Pentland’s most important legacy.
That there are still debates about what Pentland really said is, to my mind, a mark of the greatness of the man. Con-temporary scholars see his authority as worth claiming. Pent-land’s work everywhere exemplified a richness, a subtlety. a creative ambiguity, that prevents any tidy classification. More so that most of us, he was sui oeneris. He must be read himself. rather than through his interpreters. Happily, this we can now do in the case of his thesis. Let us hope that we shall shortly also be able to do so for his second unpublished masterpiece, his 1968 study for the Woods Task Force on Labour Relations, A Study of the Social, Economic and Political Background of the Canadian System of Industrial Relations.
Page revised: 1 January 2011
