Smart Globalization: The Canadian Business and Economic History Experience, 2014

As the title of the edited volume Smart Globalization implies, there is a right way and a wrong way for any country to negotiate their integration into the global economy. Drawing their theoretical position from the work of heterodox economists Ha-Joon Chang, (Kicking Away the Ladder, 2002) and Dani Rodrik, (The Globalization Paradox, 2011), Smith and Anastakis, argue that “selective” government economic policies balancing protectionist and open trade resulted in “smart globalization” (4-5). The eight essays in the collection loosely apply this thinking to individual case studies to evaluate and attempt to explain the diverse and inconsistent Canadian economic and business experience with globalization between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Smart Globalization brings the phenomenon of globalization into Canadian historiography and the contributors provide examples of how Canadian economic and business historians might engage with a broader geopolitical context. Indeed, as the book’s foreword admits, this book is “a starting point, not an end point…” (ix).

In their introduction, Smith and Anastakis make clear that the essays in Smart Globalization do not “provide simple answers or grandiose statements to the effect that globalization is either good or bad” (16). Instead, the editors have brought together six business historians and six economics and business scholars/experts to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on globalization experiences in Canadian history. By avoiding simplistic and ahistorical arguments in favour of either absolute openness or complete protectionism in foreign trade and international business, this collection leaves plenty of room to explore the complexity of globalization and the contexts that shaped particular aspects of Canada’s business history. The essays cover a broad range of topics related to natural resources (Kuhlberg on pulpwood, White on nickel), public utilities (Dilley on hydroelectricity), and specific industries (Hinton on cotton mills, Mordue on automotive manufacturing, and Taylor and Bellamy on alcohol). Taken together, however, the collection shows how Canadians governments and companies navigated delicate trade relationships with counterparts in other countries, particularly Britain and the United States. Chang and Rodrik each argue for an approach to globalization that embraces, what Smith and Anastakis describe as, “a selective mixture of protectionist and nonprotectionist policies” which positions their thinking “between antiglobalization zealots and the neoliberal ideologues…” (4- 5). But has any country ever fully embraced either absolute liberalization of its markets or complete protectionism over them? If all states in the past practiced some form of smart globalization, then the more interesting questions become: why did Canada, or any of the provincial governments, privilege one approach more than the other at any given time? And why did Canada adopt liberal trade policies in certain sectors and protectionist policies in others? Read through the Chang/Rodnik lens (which only Hinton and Dilley engage with meaningfully), the individual case studies reveal that, despite interesting parallels, globalization is highly idiosyncratic, with government officials and corporate managers making decisions that reflected the particular social, cultural, economic, and political context of their times more than any rationalized theory. Dilley, Kuhlberg, and White provide the most thoughtful treatment of national identity, natural resource endowments, and geopolitics in the context of each case study, but many of the essays tend to be more descriptive than analytical in this regard. The fundamental challenge of applying Chang’s and Rodnik’s theories to Canadian history is that it does not explain how the Canadian globalization experience differed from any other country between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.

The contributors blend government policy and business strategy perspectives, but each author tends to privilege either the former (Dilley on hydroelectricity, Kuhlberg on pulpwood, White on nickel, Hinton on cotton mills) or the latter (Mordue on automotive manufacturing, Taylor and Bellamy on alcohol). Insight into the motivations and internal workings of particular industries and firms is indispensable to the history of globalization; powerful corporations or entire sectors of the economy had the capacity to shape consumer culture. But as Smith and Anastakis point out, “globalization is, in essence, the product of political decisions” (16). As a result, the essays that situate Canada’s integration into the global economy within the context of government policies, regulations, and tariffs provide the most convincing explanations of what characterized Canada’s history of globalization.

The particular attention that the twelve (all-male) authors devote to government and corporate actors misses some opportunities to bridge economic and business history with the work of other historians interested in globalization. Perhaps most importantly, with the exception of Kuhlberg, none of the contributors devote any space to the effects of globalization on local communities, women, racial minorities, the working class, or Indigenous peoples in Canada. Smith and Anastakis refer to the “winners and losers” created by globalization (12), but Smart Globalization never challenges the fundamental tension between economic growth and inequality that lies at the heart of globalization starting in the late nineteenth century. In the introduction, Smith and Anastakis make clear that “politics trumped technology” in the shaping of the history of globalization (17), but Smart Globalization largely dismisses the important path dependencies that particular technologies played in each case study. In fact, while Smith and Anastakis refer to “technology” fourteen times in their introduction, the other eight authors use the term just nine times combined. How might our understanding of policy and business decisions be enhanced by exploring the extent to which those decisions were influenced by technological change?

The essays in Smart Globalization illustrate that globalization was an ebb and flow of boom and bust as Canada exposed its domestic markets to international influences. But the collection does not address the seemingly obvious connections between the unintended consequences of openness (e.g. the First World War) and periodic protectionist interludes that followed (e.g. the period of autarkic deglobalization that followed). For better or for worse, the essays avoid the line of reasoning that would treat periods of protectionism as moments of adjustment in the steady march toward fuller and deeper globalization through openness. For the editors, and the authors, of this collection, there was nothing inevitable about globalization or liberalism’s role in its character. In this way, Smart Globalization offers an important starting point for Canadian historians to account for the steady march of openness rather than protectionism over the last century and half in Canada.