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ABSTRACT
During the 1860s Cape Breton Island’s Sydney coalfield, at the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, experienced dramatic economic expansion. Historical interpretation of this understudied coal boom has emphasised the transition towards a liberal era of competition and growing dependence upon American capital and markets. This article presents a revised interpretation, and reflects a renewed engagement with empire in the writing of the history of Canadian capitalism. Drawing upon the work of James Belich and John Darwin, it locates this coal boom in an evolving and expanding ‘Angloworld’ and ‘British world-system,’ and demonstrates how the Sydney coalfield was shaped by the social and economic configurations that developed in the region under the British Empire. During this period, established colonial elites captured coal property and sought to integrate Cape Breton coal into the Atlantic economy in which their region had historically operated. They treated coal as a new commodity to trade and profit from, but coal mining required the mobilisation of credit and infrastructure expenditures that exceeded what was typically required to participate in the region’s traditional staples trades. Large fixed investments engendered economic and political commitments that spurred growth even under highly volatile circumstances, as promotion and speculation drove growth from the supply side and attracted London capital. Overcapacity, ruinous competition, and social crisis eventually resulted, as the Atlantic economy that gave rise to the boom fell apart. This episode reveals the operation of colonial networks and an ‘empire effect’ that produced a distinctive pattern of development on the Sydney coalfield whose legacy would be lasting.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Cape Breton News, 5 March 1864.
2 Hornsby, Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton, 169.
3 Samson, The Spirit of Industry and Improvement, 284.
4 McKay, “The Crisis of Dependent Development,” 23.
5 See, for instance, Palmer, A Culture in Conflict; Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867–1892; Cross and Kealey, Canada’s Age of Industry, 1849–1896. See also Careless, “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History,” 1–21.
6 Korneski, Race, Nation, and Reform Ideology in Winnipeg, 1880s-1920s; Smith, British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation.
7 See Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Darwin, The Empire Project.
8 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 177–206.
9 David Frank has demonstrated that coal production on Cape Breton Island developed as an industrial frontier within the Canadian Atlantic region. See Frank, J.B. McLachlan, 43–86.
10 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 200–206. A powerful case for the importance of fixed investment in transportation infrastructure in shaping coal production is made in Jones, Routes of Power, 23–87.
11 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. See also Freese, Coal.
12 The City of London’s apparent preference for colonial investment is examined in Smith, “Patriotism, Self-Interest and the “Empire Effect”,” 59–80. For the classic work on the role of finance in British imperial endeavour, see Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism.
13 Brown, The Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton, 45.
14 Clark, Acadia, 328–29.
15 Morgan, “Orphan Outpost,” 8 and 12.
16 Brown, Coal Fields, 76–77; Gerriets, “The Impact of the General Mining Association on the Nova Scotia Coal Industry,” 61–62. See also Muise, “The G.M.A. and Nova Scotia’s Coal,” 70–87; Gerriets, “The Rise and Fall of a Free-Standing Company in Nova Scotia,” 16–48; Samson, “Industrial Colonization,” 3–28.
17 See Samson, “Industrial Colonization.”
18 Brown, Coal Fields, 80–81.
19 Hornsby, Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton, 96.
20 See Samson, Spirit of Industry, 284–310.
21 The construction of merchant power in law is examined in Muir, Law, Debt, and Merchant Power.
22 Sutherland, “The Merchants of Halifax, 1815–1850,” 460 and 463.
23 Blakeley, “Sir Samuel Cunard.”
24 See, for instance, Donovan, ““May Learning Flourish”,” 89–112; Langhout, “Public Enterprise”; and Samson, Spirit of Industry.
25 Fergusson, “Thomas Dickson Archibald.”
26 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 622 (Edward P. Archbold, 4 September 1858), R.G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Baker Library, Harvard Business School [hereafter Dun & Co., BL].
27 Hornsby, Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton, 45; Harris, The Reluctant Land, 203–205.
28 This dynamic is revealed in Morgan, ““Poverty, Wretchedness, and Misery”,” 88–104.
29 Miller, Historical and Genealogical Record of the First Settlers of Colchester County, 5–9, 319 and 385.
30 MacKenzie, “John Bourinot.”
31 Tennyson, “Economic Nationalism and Confederation,” 44.
32 European and North American Railway Terminus, Sydney, Cape Breton, The Nearest Port in British North America to Europe (Sydney, 1851).
33 Masters, The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, 12–14 and 53–54.
34 See Darwin, Empire Project; and for a discussion of Britain’s structural power in the Canadian context, see Cain and Hopkins, “Afterword,” 207–210.
35 Cape Breton News, 9 December 1854; Brown, Coal Fields, 87–88.
36 Cape Breton News, 4 August 1855.
37 Brown, Coal Fields, 98; Journal and Proceedings of the House of Assembly, session 1854–5 (Halifax, 1855) [hereafter JHA], Appendix no. 92, p. 443; JHA (1856), appendix no. 7, p. 89.
38 Richard H. Brown, Lingan Mines, to ‘Papa,’ 8 July 1856, vol. 19, MG 14, General Mining Association fonds, Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University [hereafter BI].
39 U.S. Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html.
40 Castaneda, Invisible Fuel: Manufactured and Natural Gas in America, 1800–2000, 28–30 and 54–56.
41 Ledger, ‘Lingan Mines Coal Sales, 1860–1863,’ 20 D5 (c), MG 14, General Mining Association fonds BI.
42 William Young to Robert Moser, president, General Mining Association, 31 July 1854, reprinted in JHA (1854–5), appendix 3, p. 38.
43 Samson, Spirit of Industry, 305–6; Muise, “The G.M.A. and Nova Scotia’s Coal,” 78.
44 Bittermann, “The Hierarchy of the Soil,” 51–52; and Bittermann, “Farm Househols and Wage Labour in the Northeastern Maritimes in the Early 19th Century,” 35–36; Samson, Spirit of Industry, 187–224; Del Muise, “The Making of an Industrial Community,” 76–94.
45 James McKeagney, Inspector of Mines, 31 December 1859, JHA (1860), appendix ‘Coal Mines,’ p. 284.
46 Cape Breton News, 4 August 1860.
47 JHA (1856), appendix 65, p. 237.
48 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 621 (Marshall Bourinot, 4 September 1858), p. 621, Dun & Co., BL.
49 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 618 (John Bourinot, 4 September 1858 and 28 November 1860), Dun & Co., BL. See Buggey, “John Esson.”
50 Regulations for leasing of Mines Established by His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor in Council, appendix 15, JHA (1863), pp. 5–6.
51 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 487 (John Young, 2 December 1858), Dun & Co., BL.
52 JHA (1864), ‘C.J. Campbell’s Petition,’ appendix 48, p. 2.
53 History of Nova Scotia: Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of the Old Families, vol. III (Halifax: A.W. Bowen & Co., 1916), p. 185.
54 Petition, N. L. Mackay on behalf of Hector McNeil, James McNeil, and Donald McDonald, Glace Bay, 28 April 1862, vol. 61, series C, RG 20, Nova Scotia Commissioner of Crown Lands fonds, Nova Scotia Archives [hereafter NSA].
55 Debates and Proceedings of the House of Assembly, Nova Scotia (1864), Evening Session, 31 March, pp. 212–13.
56 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 621 (Marshall Bourinot, 4 September 1858), Dun & Co., BL.
57 James McKeagney, Inspector of Mines, 31 December 1859, JHA (1860), appendix ‘Coal Mines,’ pp. 284–85.
58 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 621 (Marshall Bourinot, 24 January 1860), Dun & Co., BL; JHA (1864), appendix 18, p. 16; New York, Vol. 18, p. 254 (Belloni, Farrar, & Co., 11 February 1857, 27 June 1857, 23 August 1859 and 18 April 1860), p. 254, Dun & Co., BL.
59 Letter to the editor by ‘Morien,’ Cow Bay, 19 February 1862, Cape Breton News, 22 February 1862.
60 JHA (1863), appendix 15, pp. 12–13; Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 621 (Marshall Bourinot, 13 March 1863 and 23 February 1864), and New York, Vol. 376, p. 397 (Robert Belloni & Co., 23 April 1863), Dun & Co., BL; Notice, ‘Dissolution of Copartnership,’ Halifax, 22 April 1863, Cape Breton News, 2 May 1863.
61 New York, Vol. 376, p. 397 (Robert Belloni, 25 March 1861 and 28 May 1863), Dun & Co., BL.
62 John Bourinot to M.B. Almon, 26 May 1863 and 25 April 1863, vol. 69, MG 1, M.B. Almon fonds, NSA.
63 Marshall Bourinot to M.B. Almon, 23 June? 1863, 6 August 1863, 18 August 1863, Almon fonds, NSA.
64 New York, Vol. 372, p. 943 (The Block House Mining Co., 27 December 1867), p. 943, and Vol. 376, p. 397 (Robert Belloni & Co., 26 June 1864), R.G. Dun & Co., BL.
65 JHA (1865), appendix 6, pp. 7–8; Brown, Coal Fields, 161 (Table V).
66 New York, Vol. 372, p. 943 (The Block House Mining Co., 14 August 1868), Dun & Co., BL.
67 See Archibald & Co. Ledgers (1824–46), MG 14, 45, Archibald & Co. fonds, BI; Sinclair, “Shipowning and Investment in the Port of Sydney, Nova Scotia, 1820–1914,” 25.
68 JHA (1864), appendix 18, p. 17.
69 Fergusson, “Thomas Dickson Archibald.”
70 Archibald & Co., January 1863, JHA (1863), appendix 15, pp. 13–14.
71 Uniacke,Uniacke’s Sketches of Cape Breton and Other Papers Relating to Cape Breton Island, 120.
72 JHA (1864), appendix 18, pp. 17–18.
73 JHA (1865), appendix 6, p. 7; Brown, Coal Fields, 161 (Table V).
74 Uniacke, Uniacke’s Sketches, 119–20.
75 Darwin, Empire Project, 31–32.
76 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 622 (E.P. Archbold, 4 September 1858), Dun & Co., BL.
77 Edward P. Archbold, Sydney, to W.A. Hendry, 21 December 1861, vol. 61, series C, Nova Scotia Commissioner of Crown Lands fonds, NSA; Macdonald, Coal and Iron Industries of Nova Scotia, 21.
78 Samuel P. Fairbanks, Report on Coal Mines, 12 February 1862, JHA (1862), appendix 35, p. 2.
79 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 622 (E.P. Archbold, 27 January1862), Dun & Co., BL.
80 Macdonald, Coal and Iron Industries, 21
81 Edward P. Archbold, President and Manager, Glace Bay Mining Company, 19 December 1862, JHA (1863), appendix 15, pp. 10–12.
82 This was Archbold’s projection in 1862. See his report in JHA (1863).
83 Uniacke, Uniacke’s Sketches, 127.
84 Brown, Coal Fields, 161 (Table V).
85 JHA (1865), appendix 6, pp. 8–9.
86 Petition, Little Glace Bay, 12 January 1864, vol. 18, series P, RG 5, Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia fonds, NSA.
87 Macdonald, Coal and Iron Industries, 23–24.
88 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 523 (Block Ho. Mining Co., 25 March 1871), and New York, Vol. 372, p. 943 (The Block House Mining Co., 27 December 1867), Dun & Co., BL.
89 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 1 March 1867, vol. 151, MG 1, Richard Brown family fonds [hereafter Brown fonds], NSA.
90 Masters, The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, 75–87; Marquis, In Armageddon’s Shadow, 260.
91 See also Jones, Routes of Power, 23–87.
92 Patterson, Patterson’s History of Victoria County, 71 and 114–15.
93 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 625 (Chas. J. Campbell, 4 September 1858, 13 March 1863, July 1865), and p. 352 (C.J. Campbell, 16 March 1876), Dun & Co., BL.
94 Macdonald, Coal and Iron Industries, 24; Massachusetts (Boston city), Vol. 81, p. 136 (Caledonia Coal Mining Co., 30 November 1870, 29 August 1873), Dun & Co., BL.
95 New York, Vol. 411, p. 16 (International Coal Co., 16 March 1865), Dun & Co., BL; Letter to the editor by ‘Amicus,’ 7 September 1870, Cape Breton News, 17 September 1870.
96 Macdonald, Coal and Iron Industries, 23.
97 Moreover, the American Civil War resulted in a dramatic decline in American merchant shipping capacity, from 2,496,894 to 1,387,566 tons between 1861 and 1866. See Saunders, Studies in the Economy of the Maritime Provinces, 130.
98 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 13 July 1871, 27 July 1871, 4 August 1871, 2 June 1872, 18 July 1872, 8 April 1873, 20 May 1873, 9 September 1873, Brown fonds, NSA.
99 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 1 July 1870, Brown fonds, NSA.
100 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 9 October 1868 and 19 November 1870, Brown fonds, NSA.
101 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 25 May 1866, 21 December 1866, 22 November 1867, 17 July 1869, 17 June 1869, 19 September 1870 and 13 August 1870, Brown fonds, NSA.
102 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 18 December 1870, Brown fonds, NSA
103 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 27 August 1869, Brown fonds, NSA.
104 New York, Vol. 376, p. 526 (Louis J. Belloni Jr. & Co., 12 November 1870), p. 523 (Block Ho. Mining Co., 30 November 1868, 25 March 1871), p. 789 (Block House Mining Co., 28 March 1874); Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 227 (Almon, Hare & Co., 6 May 1871); New York, Vol. 372, p. 943 (Block House Mining Co., July 1869, 25 March 1871, 4 April 1871), p. 1046 (Block House Mining Co., 7 January 1874, 14 February 1874), Dun & Co., BL.
105 Marshall Bourinot, St. Nicholas Hotel, New York, to Hon. M.B. Almon, 28 March 1865, file 612.16.D.f.11, Bourinot fonds, BI.
106 The Petition of Marshall Bourinot of Sydney in the County of Cape Breton, Esquire, 18 October 1870, file 612.16.D.f.11, Bourinot fonds, BI.
107 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 652 (South Head Coal Mining Co, 12 and 24 August 1868), Dun & Co., BL.
108 Jones, “Frederick Newton Gisborne.”
109 Pamphlet, Court House, Sydney, Cape Breton, January 1877, Gisborne versus Kennelly, p. 3.
110 Petitions, R.B. Sinclair, 9 January 1866 (and attached documents) and 5 March 1866, vol. 19, series P, Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia fonds, NSA.
111 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 20 May 1873, Brown fonds, NSA.
112 The Times (London), 4 June 1878, p. 4.
113 The Times, 1 June 1878, p. 6; The Law Reports: Appeal Cases Before the House of Lords and the Judicial Committee of the privy Council, also Peerage Cases, vol. 12 (London: Council for Law Reporting, 1887), p. 656.
114 Nova Scotia, Vol. 12, p. 391 (W.S. Symonds & Co., 21 May 1865, 30 September 1871), Dun & Co., BL; P.S. Hamilton, Chief Commissioner, Department of Mines, Mines Report, 12 December 1864, JHA (1865), appendix 6, p. 6.
115 The Times, 21 August 1871, p. 11; Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 8 September 1871, Brown fonds, NSA.
116 The Times, 4 June 1878, p. 4.
117 The Times, 14 April 1871, p. 4; Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 13 July 1871, Brown fonds, NSA.
118 The Times, 21 August 1871, p. 11.
119 Concern over the potential exhaustion of domestic coal supplied emerged within Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, and by 1871 there was a ‘coal panic.’ See Madureira, “The Anxiety of Abundance,” 415.
120 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 5 December 1871, Brown fonds, NSA; The Times, 11 January 1872, p. 5.
121 The Times, 3 April 1879, p. 12.
122 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 6 May 1872, Brown fonds, NSA.
123 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 27 August 1872, Brown fonds, NSA.
124 The Times, 7 March 1873, p. 11.
125 The Times, 14 March 1873, p. 7.
126 Law Reports, p. 657; The Times, 6 November 1873, p. 4.
127 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 13 July 1871, Brown fonds, NSA.
128 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 8 September 1871, Brown fonds, NSA.
129 See Law Reports, pp. 552–72.
130 The Times, 1 June 1878, p. 6.
131 Richard Brown to R.H. Brown, 16 June 1872 and 11 February 1871, Brown fonds, NSA.
132 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 200–206.
133 McKay, “Crisis of Dependent Development,” 24.
134 See, for instance, John Shaw to William C. McDonald, 25 March 1878, file 27, MG 9, William C. McDonald fonds, BI; McKay, “Crisis of Dependent Development,” 35–41.
135 Minutes of Evidence, Select Committee on ‘Coal and Inter-Provincial Trade,’ Robert Belloni, 16 March 1877, Sessional Papers, vol. 11 (1877), appendix 4; McKay, “Crisis of Dependent Development,” 23.
136 For a broad account of the Maritime region’s economic transition under the National Policy, see Acheson, “The National Policy and the Industrialization of the Maritimes, 1880–1910,” 3–28
137 Darwin, Empire Project, 150 and 159.
138 Tennyson, “Economic Nationalism and Confederation.”
139 On mainland Nova Scotia, by contrast, the Intercolonial Railway tied the coalfield in Springhill to the industrial economy of the Canadian nation-state during the 1870s. See McKay, “Crisis of Dependent Development,” 34.
140 MacGillivray, “Henry Melville Whitney Comes to Cape Breton,” 54–56.
141 Frank, “The Cape Breton Coal Industry and the Rise and Fall of the British Empire Steel Corporation,” 5–13; Beckert, “American Danger,” 1137–70.
142 This experience complicates the trend in the Maritime region during the 1850s and 1860s towards state enterprise and growing commitment to landward investment argued in Langhout, “Public Enterprise.”
143 See Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 190–282.
144 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution.
145 See Forsey, “Economic and Social Aspects of the Nova Scotia Coal Industry,” 133; Frank, J.B. MacLachlan, 179–392; Frank, “Rise and Fall of the British Empire Steel Corporation,” 3–34; Schwartzman, “Mergers in the Nova Scotia Coalfields.”