Maritime Capital: The Shipping Industry in Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914

James Pritchard is a professor of History at Queen’s University.

Maritime Capital represents a marked improvement over the author’s
previous work, Seafaring Labour, to which it is best seen as a sequel.
Both resulted from a lengthy collaboration with several members of the
Atlantic Canada Shipping Project at Memorial University. In this newest
work Sager denies the hoary old view that the decline of shipbuilding
and shipowning in Atlantic Canada during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was due to technological change. Instead, he offers
a sophisticated, if not always well-focused, argument that points to
Maritimers themselves as chiefly responsible for the change. After
accounting for the rise of Maritime shipbuilding from an enclave of
imported British capital early in the nineteenth century and its
development into an indigenous colonial industry based on the region’s
natural resources and on state protection controlled by local merchant
capital, he explains why the industry declined. The end of the shipping
and shipbuilding industries in the Maritime provinces cannot be
attributed to the decline in freight rates, to impersonal market forces,
or to new technology; rather, it resulted from a large number of
relatively minor investment decisions made by Maritime merchants to
place their capital elsewhere in different sectors of the economy. These
decisions arose not because the new areas were especially more
profitable than shipping and shipowning but because of their increased
attractiveness, chiefly owing to the lack of integration of state policy
and capital late in the century.

Although it has some organizational difficulties involving the division
of theoretical discussions into separate sections at the beginning and
end of the book, and its argument seems overburdened by too much
empirical evidence with little relevance to the main thesis, this book
is worth study. Its author presents some challenging
ideas—particularly concerning class, culture, and information—that
deserve attention.