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  • Merchant Princes: Halifax's First Family of Finance, Ships, and Steel
  • Ken Pryke
Merchant Princes: Halifax's First Family of Finance, Ships, and Steel. James D. Frost. Toronto: James Lorimer, 2003, Pp. 376. illus. $40.00 cloth

In Merchant Princes James D. Frost has undertaken a case study of a family that participated in a number of significant developments in Nova [End Page 818] Scotian history. As he duly notes, there are a number of economic studies of the province but few that focus on entrepreneurship and the family firm. Yet, he argues, entrepreneurship has been much more widespread in the Maritimes than is usually supposed, and it deserves much more attention than it has received. This aspect, therefore, is made the focus of his study of the business activities of the Stairs family, which began in 1810 when William Machin Stairs (1789-1865) established himself as a small-scale general merchant on the Halifax waterfront. In the early years the business focused on chandlery and activities related to shipping. The Stairses moved from merchant, to industrialist, to financier, and then back to mercantile capitalism. Thus, the book falls into three parts.

In his account of the first phase of the history of the Stairs family, Frost follows analysts who argue that the industrialization of Halifax was prevented by the mercantile interests of the Halifax merchants. Thus he accepts as inevitable that both William Machin Stairs and his eldest son, William James Stairs (1819-1906), actively opposed Confederation. However, in 1868, in the midst of the campaign to repeal the Act of Union, William J. Stairs made 'the incredibly bold decision' to build a very extensive ropeworks in Dartmouth. Rather than see this major foray into manufacturing as a challenge to his mercantilism thesis, Frost sees it as merely a pragmatic response to Confederation.

The second part of the Stairs family history, which Frost regards as the 'National Policy' phase, focuses on a period of about twenty years and concerns William F. Stairs (1848-1904). From the early 1880s to his death in 1904, in conjunction with what was known as the Scotia Group, he substantially altered the scale and direction of the family's business by establishing regionally centred affairs through his mergers of cordage firms and sugar refineries and the creation of a steel industry in Nova Scotia. In order to develop new regional sources of capital, Stairs, in Frost's view, was a pioneer in building legal and regulatory frameworks for these new forms of financial structure. Frost contrasts Stairs's success in promoting regional development with the obstacles that he had encountered in promoting regional interests, particularly at the federal level.

Stairs's death in 1904 brought an end to plans for a regionally controlled financial and industrial base. Much of this development, Frost argues, was due to the role played in the years immediately following Stairs's death by Max Aitken, who had been an employee of the Scotia Group since 1900. It was the latter's self-aggrandisement and insistence on profit maximization, Frost argues, that led Aitken to betray everything that Stairs had stood for. He thus rejects current arguments that economic [End Page 819] growth in Nova Scotia was ultimately fated to fail because of factors such as an inadequate resource base.

The structure that had supported the family activities in commercial, industrial, and financial affairs was quickly disbanded. The family still held the ropeworks and family hardware firm, but the latter stagnated for some years. Finally, in 1927 Cyril W. Stairs (1891-1953) acquired the firm and moved into strong, new areas such as construction equipment. After Cyril's death, the family business was taken over by his son, Arthur D. Stairs. However, changing business conditions and the fact that Arthur developed Lou Gehrig's disease led to the sale of the firm in 1971 to a private investment company and its acquisition in 1975 by a New Brunswick competitor.

Frost regards the survival of the family firm from 1810 to 1975 as a remarkable display of the entrepreneurship and business abilities long displayed by Maritime business. He strongly suggests that these same entrepreneurial qualities should be used to...

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