Peter Baskerville

Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada

UNEMPLOYMENT IN CANADA appeared in the Victorian era as a corollary of growing dependence on wage labour as a source of income. As alternative non-wage strategies began to shrink or disappear, and as seasonality became a less relevant consideration, the phenomenon of unemployment was discovered. Nineteenth-century observers, steeped in liberal individualism, were quick to assign to the unemployed negative qualities, among which sloth was the principle deadly sin. Naming the fact of regular, widespread, and persistent joblessness was a first step in problematizing unemployment; coming to know what it was in human terms proved elusive for Victorian commentators. The identification of unemployment as a social problem is the subject of the first substantive chapter in this text, but it is a theme to which the authors r e tu rn r e peatedly. Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager approach their quarry the economically vulnerable, those thousands the waters of politics (137). It is an important contribution to the growing literature on the Malaspina expedition, especially for readers not at home in Spanish.

Home Ownership and Spacious Homes: Equity under Stress in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada

This article attempts to contribute to a burgeoning literature on Canadian housing history. It approaches the nature of housing by linking two measurements often examined in isolation: ownership and interior space. Using data from the Canadian Families Project’s 5 percent random sample of the nominal census returns for Canada in 1901, this article presents the first national analysis comparing housing ownership and housing space in both rural and urban Canada. It attempts to determine, via a series of logistic regressions, the relative importance of several social and economic variables on a family’s chances of owning a home and of living in a crowded or relatively spacious environment. The article demonstrates that the social and economic influences on the chances of ownership differed in some significant ways from the influences on the chances of living in a spacious home.

Displaying the Working Class: The 1901 Census of Canada

he series of questions relating to an individual’s relationship to hisher workplace constitutes one of T the greatest strengths of the 1901 census of Canada. This article considers the utility of the information in the census on occupation, employment status, and place and duration of work. Earlier, Eric Sager and I explored the reasons why this census concentrated on workplace relationships more than any previous census and more than U.S. and British censuses of that time (see Baskerville and Sager 1995). Put simply, the Canadian government was for many reasons interested in finding out about the new workers on the block: those who worked in factory conditions. A further important influence, one far from unique to this census, is the issue of gender (see, among many others, Higgs 1987; Folbre 1991; Folbre and Abel 1989; Conk 1981). Unlike one’s relationship to factorylike work, however, gender significantly influenced the odds of being included in the work force (i.e., recognized as having an occupation). For those with an occupation, gender did not significantly affect the likelihood of there being additional workplace-related information in the census return.

Unemployment, living standards, and the working-class family in urban Canada in 1901

This article addresses a problem faced by many historians of living standards: what was the effect of unemployment on the real incomes of working-class families during industrialization? The 1901 Census of Canada offers a rare opportunity to answer this question, and to measure both unemployment and living standards while taking into account the contributions of all family wage-earners. The conclusion is that average weekly or monthly wages were more important than work duration in determining the living standards of poor families.

The First National Unemployment Survey: Unemployment and the Canadian Census of 1891

The 1891 census asked Canadians if they had been unemployed in the week preceding the taking of the census. On the basis of a preliminary analysis of responses from working class areas in British Columbia, we comment on the nature of this source, and on the possibility of using it to determine both the extent of unemployment and the characteristics of the unemployed. We demonstrate our conclusion that this source has significant utility by testing the hypothesis that unemployment was a structural problem in the industrial capitalist labour market and not simply a result of specific deficiencies in part of the labour force.n n Resumen n Le recensement de 1891 demanda aux Canadiens sils avaient ete sans travail dans le semaine precedant le recensement. Une analyse preliminaire des reponses provenant des quartiers ouvriers de la Colombie Britannique nous permet de commenter cette source et detudier son utilite pour determiner letendue du chomage et les caracteristiques des sans-travail. Nous concluons quil sagit dune source importante pour verifier lhypothese selon laquelle le chomage presentait un probleme struturel dans le marche capitaliste du travail et η etait pas simplement le resultat de deficiences specifiques de la force de travail.

Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada@@@Labouring the Canadian Millennium: Writings on Work and Workers, History and Historiography@@@Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and their Families in Late Victorian Canada

Grandmother Andre told stories in front of a campfire. Elizabeth Goudie wrote a memoir in school scribblers. Phyllis Knight taped hours of interviews with her son. Todays families rely on television and video cameras. They are all making history. In a different approach to that old issue, the Canadian identity, Gerald Friesen links the media studies of Harold Innis to the social history of recent decades. The result is a framework for Canadian history as told by ordinary people. Friesen suggests that the common peoples perceptions of time and space in what is now Canada changed with innovations in the dominant means of communication. He defines four communication-based epochs in Canadian history: the oral-traditional world of pre-contact Aboriginal people; the textual-settler household of immigrants; the print-capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the screen-capitalism that has emerged in the last few decades. This analysis of communication is linked to distinctive political economies, each of which incorporates its predecessors in an increasingly complex social order. In each epoch, using the new communication technologies, people struggled to find the political means by which they could ensure that they and their households survived and, if they were lucky, prospered. Canada is the sum of their endeavours. .Citizens and Nation. demonstrates that it is possible to find meaning in the nations past that will interest, among others, a new, young, and multicultural reading audience.

Family history in canada: An Introduction

Contemporary debates about “family crisis” has led to a resurgence of interest in family history in Canada. The field builds on the strong tradition of demographic history in Quebec, and on historical sociology, historical geography, ethnohistory, and recent developments in cultural history. Recent projects in both Quebec and English Canada have accepted the challenge of international comparative analysis.

Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870

PLANTING THE PROVINCE: THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF UPPER CANADA, 1784-1870. Douglas McCalla. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. 446 pp.A CONCISE HISTORY OF BUSINESS IN CANADA. Graham Taylor and Peter Baskerville. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994. 491 pp.FARM, FACTORY AND FORTUNE: NEW STUDIES IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE MARITIME PROVINCES. Kris Inwood. Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1993. 274 pp.The last 20 years of research and writing on Canadian economic history has presented an admirable and probing examination of important, but specialized questions -- from the nature of particular entrepreneurs in given communities, to the details of district migration flows, to analysis of rural social structure. New statistical approaches have been used, new theoretical perspectives have been applied, and old views challenged.Now, as one would expect, volumes are beginning to emerge that build on this new research and present a broad perspective on some of the long-standing themes of Canadian economic development, questioning established wisdom in fundamental ways.Douglas McCalla, for instance, in Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870 puts it sharply: Canadians have usually understood their countrys economic development, in virtually any region or period, as a process led by the successive exploitation of a number of staples, which are resource-based commodities, typically subject to relatively limited processing and destined primarily for export markets. From a staples perspective, economic growth, in which one or two sectors lead or propel the entire regional economy forward.... This book argues that focusing on staples alone yields an oversimplified and fundamentally inaccurate view of the process of economic development in Upper Canada (5).Graham Taylor and Peter Baskerville, in A Concise History of Business in Canada also find the staples theory too confining for their synthesis. Their effort is to transcend that framework and review the pattern of Canadian business evolution in terms of: a) how firms in all capitalist economies have shifted to specialized from general merchant activities, or have made increased use of joint-stock corporations: b) how firms in Canada have been affected by specific Canadian realities such as regional diversity and migration patterns as well as changing staple exports; and c) how the world economy has affected firms through shifting financial pressures, changes in technology, and new state economic roles.In the work he has edited, Farm, Factory and Fortune: new Studies in the Economic History of the Maritime Provinces, Kris Inwood, too, takes on a powerful piece of conventional wisdom -- the argument that Confederation brought about the relative decline of the Maritime provinces in Canadian economic development. On the contrary, says Inwood, Canada began its national existence with strong regional inequalities. The phenomenon of regional disparities was a challenge inherited by the first national government rather than a consequence of its actions (97).Each of these volumes reveals three areas of strength. The first is simply that each presents effectively and professionally a very large and complex body of recent analysis and research. McCalla is especially impressive in drawing together extensive references to recent work in economic history, history, sociology, political economy and demography relating to the formative years of Upper Canada. Taylor and Baskerville have taken on a more ambitious task by attempting to cover some 350 years of Canadian business history, but their range of references is very good -- and seeks to probe such areas as the role of women entrepreneurs in a helpful way. Inwood provides a fine guide to recent work on the Maritimes.Second, all three volumes also confront the question of macroeconomics and economic development in ways that are unusual among economic historians. …

Americans in Britain's Backyard: The Railway Era in Upper Canada, 1850–1880

Canadian lines that were spreading out over what would become the Province of Ontario looked forward, in the years before the American Civil War, to becoming important east-west carriers between the rapidly growing American cities of the eastern seaboard and the still-new cities of the American Midwest. Canadas small population and undeveloped industry would force her railroads to rely heavily on traffic going from one American city to another. Lines like the Grand Trunk and the Great Western struggled desperately therefore, to avoid American financial control. With the help of British capital, they succeeded. But Americas contribution to Canadian railroading ran much deeper than money. Dominating the skilled engineers and experienced construction contractors who came from south of the border was more difficult for Canadian directors to manage. In the end, however, it was the early failure of top Canadian management to bury their rivalries, ignore their English creditors, emulate Americans like Vanderbilt, Thomson, and Garrett, and consolidate into an integrated line between New England, the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and the Midwest that doomed their railroads to becoming, as one Canadian put it, “side streets to the trade thoroughfare.”