Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930 (review)

Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850-1930. By Robert Lewis (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 336 pp. $45.00

Lewis has focused his geographical curiosity and insight on studying the remaking of the most important urban industrial landscape in Canada from the early Victorian period to the Great Depression. He addresses such well-explored issues as the move of manufacturing to the suburbs, the technological renovation of production, and differences in the accessibility of materials due to new modes of freight transportation. His research proceeds in more novel directions when he examines the relationship between changes in the organization of production with decisions to relocate factories, and when he explores the strategies of business and political elites in relocating industry and workers' housing. Lewis ascribes what he sees as the current neglect and misunderstand- ing of the role of industry in organizing urban space to a stubborn academic adherence to the aging theoretical approach known as urban ecology. He confidently declares that "the picture I have drawn of Montreal's manufacturing geography between 1850 and 1929 fits neither the description nor the interpretation of manufacturing and working-class decentralization given by successive cohorts of urbanists" (255).

A more meticulous analysis of the evidence about urban manufacturing than Lewis' is difficult to imagine. Having discovered that the census records were of little help, he utilized the surviving records of the water tax for Montreal and its former suburbs. These documents provided the most complete listing of businesses and their locations. They recorded the annual levy on rent, or its market equivalent, and served as the basis for estimating the size, capital value, or employment profile of businesses. With this systematic baseline and city directories, Lewis reconstructed the location, scale, and character of manufacturing in 1861, 1890, and 1929. In order to examine the nature of change within important industries between these dates, he undertook case studies of production in a number of industrial sectors. He also investigated the links between the governors of industry and the capitalists whose investments controlled the residential development of the city, arranging his chapters about the changing manufacturing landscape by time period and district. Manufacturing, he argues, has a long history of decentralization; Montreal has been formed, in crucial respects, by the deliberate creation of a succession of suburban industrial districts, which has significantly influenced the geography of the city.

This book offers a rich view of Montreal between 1850 and 1929. It will satisfy Montreal enthusiasts more than those interested in a more general argument. Lewis delivers his findings on each industrial district at the two time periods (1850 to 1890 and 1890 to 1929) in great detail. This emphasis on the specificity of local circumstances tends to obscure the larger view of changes in manufacturing organization and production.