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

How did Canadian business leaders handle major political changes in the period from the declaration of the First World War to the conclusion of the Second World War? How did their responses reflect fundamental differences dividing old and new political landscapes? In Dominion of Capital, Don Nerbas relates a tale of two political economies—one, rooted in longstanding National Policy protection of manufacturing entrepreneurs; and the other, welcoming the state’s engineering of continental economic integration. Nerbas argues that defenders of the old political economy, largely railway magnates based in Montreal, were unable to halt the forces of change that threatened to overturn the state’s relationship with private capital. He finds that this national bourgeoisie was in a state of “crisis” during this period, the result of being “too rigid and too classically liberal to respond effectively to the emerging political challenges created by the onset of the Depression” (p. 24).

Published as part of University of Toronto Press’ Social History series, Nerbas eschews a strictly grand theory style study of the capitalist class, choosing instead to present close portraits of leading businessmen. Each chapter is structured as a mini-biography of selected figures, including conservative news mogul Howard P. Robinson, progressive financier and politician Charles A. Dunning, Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) president Edward Beatty, General Motors president Sam McLaughlin, and wartime political oligarch C.D. Howe. While these characters are not necessarily typical of average businessmen, they are apparently representative of 102 members of the nationally-significant business elite during this period and their collective responses to a changing political economy (p. 12). The book is organized thematically according to each biography, but also takes into account chronological developments that occurred in the transition from old to new political economy. A social historical and comparative biographical analysis of these major figures allows Nerbas to identify individual responses to political changes that are shaped by discrete personal circumstances while situating them within the broader story told by statistical information from different geographical regions and sectors of the economy. As a result, he is able to effectively consider the evolution and impact of the “crisis” as it pertained to different ideologies and sectors of the Canadian bourgeoisie.

The temporal focus of the book spans a period of intense change that rocked the business elite. The period following World War One saw the locus of economic power gradually shift from Montreal to Toronto, and with this came a turn toward the United States and away from Britain. The result was a major overhaul in the thinking of the period which was dominated by the politics of the railway. Railway politics are a major theme in the book given that the interests of National Policy-era capitalists in the old political economy were rooted in the operation of the railway system which was intimately connected with global economy of the British Empire. The changing politics of the railway also enable Nerbas to demonstrate significant overlap and conversation between the new and old orders, which effectively began with the creation of the state-owned Canadian National Railway (CNR) in the early post-World War One period to consolidate and nationalize failed private rail lines. The CNR constituted a major source of competition for the privately-owned CPR and was followed by similar nationalization projects during the 1920s and 1930s. Nerbas contends that by the end of the Second World War, the political relationship between capitalists and the government had been fundamentally restructured. Nerbas contends that it was the Depression which stripped the business elite of any legitimacy to back their claims as effective community stewards (p. 244). Indeed, the severity of the economic failure also signalled the general failure of the old economic elite to effectively transition to a new political economy based around state management to ensure efficiency and productivity.

Nerbas presents the case for a revised understanding...