A Conjunction of Interests: Business, Politics, and Tariffs, 1825-1879

Steven K. Holloway was Assistant Professor of Political Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia.

This book is part of the University of Toronto Press’s State and Economic Life series edited by Mel Watkins and Leo Panitch. Forster, an historian, is a faculty member of the University of Western Ontario.

Though the title of the book seems to promise a broad historical survey of tariff policy in the nineteenth century, in fact the author’s main concern is the National Policy tariff of 1879 and political events immediately preceding it. Indeed, the events of 1825 to the Reciprocity Treaty (1854) occupy a mere 20 pages.

The study focuses primarily on interest-group politics of the 1870s and surveys a range of manufacturing, commercial, farming, and labour associations with regard to their interests in Canadian tariff policy. Through careful archival research, Forster documents the process of interest aggregation, organization formation, and political lobbying carried out by these groups during the Liberal government of the 1870s. What he shows us is how, out of a miasma of competing business interests and associations, a protectionist ideology and organization emerges in the 1878 election to support the Conservative party. Nonetheless, the fragmentation of business interest is stressed to the point of disputing the idea that the 1879 tariff was dictated by the manufacturers’ associations.

Forster gives scant treatment to events covered elsewhere such as the Reciprocity Treaty and the Treaty of Washington 1871. In discussing early arguments for protection, he emphasizes revenue generation, incidental protection, and retaliation for American cancellation of reciprocity as motivations found even among free-trade Liberals. On the Conservative and protectionist side, he devotes much analysis to the corporatist “harmony of interest” argument.

While rich in historical detail, Forster’s work at times lacks focus, particularly in the early chapters where important points are often lost in minutiae. Broader theoretical frameworks are only mentioned in passing in the final pages, where the author concludes that his study probably best fits pluralist theory. Nonetheless, for scholars in economic history, Canadian politics, and external relations, the author has consolidated a rich field of archival information for a crucial period in the development of Canadian economic policy.