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Book Review
| The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines & Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941. By H.V. Nelles. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005 [1974]. xxxi + 514 pp. Note on Sources, Index. Paper $29.95.
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| The recent reissue of The Politics of Development (with new introductions by the author and Robert Young) offers the chance to reflect on the enduring influence of the original work and consider some of the intellectual roots of environmental history in Canada. After all, not only has The Politics of Development become a staple of course readings and comprehensives lists for at least a couple of generations of Canadian historians, the author has gone on to a decorated career as an author and teacher. H. V. Nelles is not only a two-time winner of the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for best book in Canadian history, but also the supervisor of two winners of the ASEH's Rachel Carson Prize for best dissertation in environmental history. |
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The Politics of Development examines the political economy of resource development in one province, Ontario, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. This period saw the spatial expansion and intensification of resource-extractive activities in Ontario, especially in the mineral, forest, and hydroelectric power sectors. The main thrust of the argument is to account for the continued provincial ownership of resources during this period and to evaluate whether this had any impact on the process and pattern of exploitation. The answer, Nelles contends, is a qualified no. Public interest in and benefit from resource extraction was often narrowly interpreted by government officials as coincident with industry priorities. The main preoccupations of provincial administrations were industrial promotion and the provision of discounted infrastructure works to the industries. In spite of the heroic myths of entrepreneurialism and risk in opening up new resource territories, Nelles writes that "the development of New Ontario was a joint public and private venture, a provincial equivalent to the opening of the west" (p. 109). For all it retained a stake, sometimes large, in the ownership and regulation of natural resources, the province remained, Nelles contends, largely a "client" of business (p. 495). |
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Perhaps not surprisingly, The Politics of Development stirred the interest of historians in the 1970s mainly for its political economy approach and its deployment of a regional-scale analysis. Although some reviewers chided Nelles for "over-reaching" in his arguments about the interpenetration of business and government in natural resource management, the book was, overall, well-received. In his review for the Journal of Forest History, distinguished Canadian forest historian A. R. M. Lower lamented the "left-of-center" critiques of business and development in Ontario. But Lower admitted Nelles's emphasis on the "planlessness, disorder, greed, and corruption" that characterized much natural resource development, and concluded that he "ended [the book] quite caught up in the story." Nelles's work exemplified the best of the strong regional and political economy traditions within Canadian history during the 1970s, and which produced important critical insights into the expansion of the Canadian staple economy in various parts of the country. |
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The book retained its appeal for subsequent generations of readers (as both Young and Nelles himself point out) seeking information on the roots of the large-scale landscape transformations that accompanied industrial resource development in Canada. The enduring interest in The Politics of Development for Canadian historians mirrors that of Samuel Hays's Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Pittsburgh, 1959) for American historians. Indeed, in their discussions of conservation, the state and natural resource development, both works have been seen as environmental history avant la lettre. But, like Hays's book, The Politics of Development was not written with an explicitly "environmental" focus; its story takes shape in boardrooms and legislatures, rather than in backwoods or landscapes. Both books are foremost studies of the political processes guiding (or, perhaps, inhibiting) the management of natural resources for economic development. Yet these works pioneered environmental historical studies in their respective countries by documenting the emergence of conservation ideology and its ties to the movements for scientific management of resources and efficiency in business. Business interests, politicians and other public leaders rapidly embraced conservation ideals in both countries, and leading American figures such as Gifford Pinchot and Bernard Fernow (appointed the first Dean of Forestry at the University of Toronto in 1907) were influential in promoting conservation ideology in Canada. But for all the rhetoric around conservation in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Nelles notes, Canadian conservationists were "emasculated" by the lack of a generative issue, such as public resource ownership, that provided the American movement with what Hays referred to as its religious enthusiasm. |
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Readers looking for information on the physical transformation of nature, evidence of ecological change and degradation, or the influence of environmental conditions on human actions and institutions, will not find them in these pages. Nelles frankly notes in the introduction that, had this book been written ten or twenty years later, it may have contained a good deal more discussion of the environmental impacts of the political economy he describes. Still, the reissue of this important work should be welcomed by environmental historians, not only in Canada, but wherever scholars seek a model for understanding evolving patterns of the regulation and exploitation of natural resources. |
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Arn Keeling is assistant professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research examines the historical geography of environmentalism, pollution control, and industrial development in western and northern Canada. |
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