Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914–1947 by Don Nerbas (review)

Written with verve, this book offers a renewed view of the capitalist transition of the 1930s and 1940s in Canada, as it shifted from what the author identifies as a British imperial national policy context to a time of direct state economic intervention and a North American axis. The shift to a North American continentalist context is old hat from a political perspective, mourned as it was by Donald Creighton in The Forked Road (1976). Creighton and those of the accompanying Laurentian school would not have found the argument of Don Nerbas’s book uncongenial, though they would have bridled at the class interpretation provided.

The five figures the author examines at length are deemed by him to be representative men of a social grouping he variously identifies as the bourgeoisie, an elite, an upper class, and a business class. Howard P. Robinson, Charles A. Dunning, and Edward Beatty (the National Policy group), together with Sam McLaughlin (continentalist) and C.D. Howe (continentalist and state interventionist), make up the select few examined in detail. One does wonder about the principles of selection. It would have been useful to have some estimate of their actual wealth, in order to place them more precisely within the galaxy of the larger group they purportedly represent. Nerbas chose them out of an initial relatively small selection of 102, all of whom really should have been listed in an appendix. Even this larger group could hardly be deemed to be “the bourgeoisie” in the common notion of the term. Perhaps the 102 might be deemed to be members of the haut bourgeoisie, financial capitalists largely freed from the petty concerns of any individual enterprise, but we don’t know. In any case, they were an elite, a very rarified elite.

It is also certain that, other than Robinson, these are men of high public profile. Even Robinson, by virtue of his newspaper ownership, had a direct though somewhat insidious public impact. They were intertwined with the world of politics, most specifically in the cases of Dunning and Howe. Were they the political point men of their class? Is this what makes the five worthy of special consideration? Nerbas would have served the reader better by being more explicit about his methodology and his terminology.

Placing individuals within the context of their class is a deeply enriching historical tool, and we should be grateful to Nerbas for pursuing this mode of analysis. Nerbas figures Howe in a particularly enlivening way in the emergence of the interventionist state. Howe’s role in this is largely denied by his biographers Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, though it incidentally troubled Michael Bliss. Nerbas etches Howe as a technocrat, an almost unknowing architect in the making of state-sponsored managerial capitalism, someone whom Thorstein Veblen might have critically admired. Robinson’s dyspeptic meanderings in his later maturity provide critical fodder for Nerbas’s perspectives about the anti-democratic and racist strain in his elite’s outlook. Robinson, not really examined by historians before Nerbas, emerges as a Maritimes-first man who effectively becomes a member of the Montreal-based elite, both because of the pull of capital and because of ideological conviction. Dunning too is followed in the subversion of his regional interests and his co-option by key members of the politicized Montreal plutocracy, particularly Beatty. This is rich and worthy stuff.

We are given, then, an interesting though not entirely compelling interpretation of the politics of big business in a period of transition, triggered by the combined crises of depression and war. Nerbas shows himself particularly adept at forceful summaries of events and conflicts of interest; indeed, though it would have been more bloodless, he might have considered an interest-group perspective, if only to reject it. This is a first cut at a big subject, and one hopes that Nerbas keeps on the...