1 THINKING AND WRITING ABOUT MARITIME HISTORY has always been intensely personal for me.1 Although I have made my adult life in a different province, (largely) in a different language, and do my main academic work on an unrelated topic, there remains an integral part of me conditioned by having grown up in Upper Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia. Much of this, I suppose, is similar to what any of us feels when we look back: a childhood home lost, formative relationships broken up, old friends now gone. As bell hooks has written, “We are born and have our being in a place of memory.”2 But another part is a result of having experienced my early political awakenings in a household steeped in the radical regionalism of the 1980s, my central analyses shaped by that New Maritimes3 generation that adapted core-periphery frameworks to the regional context while denouncing the exploitation of the transient, Maritime “light infantry of capital.”4 This formulation, and therefore mine, was all about “our people,” “our culture,” and our “colonization” by Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, Toronto, and, later, the multinational corporations of the Alberta tar sands.5

2 Regional historiography has since evolved. Feminist histories of the interactions between state and civil society, new avenues of investigation into slavery and racism, and scholarship on colonialism and Indigenous resistance have complicated our understandings of power.6 Successive recent waves of transnational studies and environmental history have raised important questions about the ongoing relevance of regional frameworks.7 And, on the economic front, historians of rural capitalism and of fisheries have contributed works that call the underdevelopment approach into question on a number of levels.8

3 My own understanding of the region has, of course, also shifted, shaped by these historiographical discussions and by the experience of grassroots political organizing in the very different urban context of Montreal. All the same, however, my sense is that the demise of the underdevelopment framework has left a gap yet to be filled in the articulation of systematic investigations into the nature and workings of capitalism in the Maritimes. In what follows I aim to critically re-engage with this scholarship, seeking to determine which, if any, of its central questions still hold promise for understanding the history of the region and attempting to imagine what a “new history of capitalism” might look like in this context.9

4 For much of the latter half of the 20th century, various versions of the narrative of Maritime economic underdevelopment exercised a virtual stranglehold over the study of the region’s position in the country. Post-Second World War Maritime-born scholars experiencing the indignity of regional stereotypes in universities in central and western Canada and the frustrations at home of an alphabet soup of successive, incomplete federal government regional development programs10 helped develop an alternative regionalist narrative – a story of political machinations in far-off Ottawa systematically disadvantaging regional interests and of a central Canadian historiography littered with falsehoods of patronage-ridden regional conservatism and inevitable decline after a “Golden Age” of wind and sail in the mid-19th century.11

5 The narrative of underdevelopment particularly influenced the rapidly growing number of labour historians of Atlantic Canada in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the solidification of Atlantic Canada Studies as a field. These scholars constructed a Golden Age narrative of their own, focusing on the brief window of regional industrialization and labour strength between the 1890s’ “Second Industrial Revolution” and the deindustrialization of the 1920s. The contrast between the Progressive dynamism of the beginning of the 20th century and the disastrous consequences of regional takeover by Central Canadian capital were particularly stark in this version of the region’s past, as historians painted a picture of modernity betrayed: “In the 1910s,” wrote Ian McKay, “Maritimers had seen their region as one of advanced and advancing capitalism; its central problems were those of industrial societies the world over. But in the 1920s, the region would be seen anew, as industries collapsed, as workers and their radical leaders were obliged to emigrate in large numbers, and as a conservative regionalism came to replace what had been a progressive ‘common sense’.”12 More than a simple historiographical trend, the underdevelopment narrative gave expression to a generational rejection of previously dominant cultural tropes as anti-poverty activists like my parents sought to throw off “the illusion of boringness” in favour of a “narrative of regional experience as the basis of which the Maritimes could become politically engageable”13 – a kind of local anti-imperialism reflecting the broader left-nationalist trends sweeping the country.14

6 The dominant focus on an incredibly small window of urban industrialization left scholars of the region trapped in a defense of regional modernity that tended to flatten out difference. Regional history textbooks oriented around categories of “pre-Industrial” and “Industrial Revolution,” labour strikes, and the contradictions of the post-war compromise created a sort of illusion of unifying forces shaping a common history and regional destiny. They precluded serious studies of segregation and apartheid in the region and, with some exceptions, of any prolonged consideration of socially reproductive labour.15 The result was a kind of Braudelian confusion between the événementiel and the conjoncturel – understanding small historical ripples in the local experience of the broader capitalist system as determinative rather than indicative of broader patterns at work.16

7 Still, this “Maritime Marxist school . . . was the first extended and collective scholarly effort in Canada to link capitalist development to labour and other social movements in one region,”17 and its replacement with the multiplicity of “subject-positions, epistemologies and methodologies” outlined by Ian McKay at the turn of the 21st century has complicated attempts to understand capitalism in the region.18 I want then here to return to two central focuses of the underdevelopment school – historical patterns of dispossession and extraction and the contradictory manifestations of these struggles played out in the state – and to think through how we might go about re-examining these important subjects with fresh eyes.

8 As Seth Rockman has argued, one of the particularities of the “new history of capitalism” literature in the American context is its denaturalization of market relations, and, in turn, of previously dominant periodizations and spatial concepts and of earlier focuses of “transitions” from one mode of production to another.19 In our context such a project would require a reconsideration of the Atlantic region’s experience in the “long eighteenth century,” critiquing and moving through the remaining tropes of merchant capital’s “Golden Age” and paying attention instead to the ways in which the foundations of Atlantic Canadian society and therefore capitalist production were forged in the crucible of what Jerry Bannister has termed the “Forty Years War” (1744-1784) of European imperial competition over Indigenous territory in northeastern North America – a period of consolidation within the world capitalist system in which settler states like those of British North America were gradually shifting into a semi-peripheral position within the world economy.20

9 Starting anew from this point would also entail a radical re-engagement with the impact of imperial racial hierarchies on the emerging political economy of the region. Historians Harvey Amani Whitfield and Ken Donovan and archaeologists Catherine Cottreau-Robbins and Heather MacLeod-Leslie, for instance, have worked hard in recent years to pierce the “Free North” myth of Canadian multiculturalism, establishing the importance of chattel slavery not only to French and pre-Revolution Planter settler schemes but also its integral place in Loyalist society after 1783. Whitfield, in particular, draws a picture of a world in which multi-occupational enslaved people lived in close quarters with their masters and were a non-negligible part of building the Loyalist economy. In a time of great flux and judicial uncertainty, the line between free Black Loyalists and the enslaved was porous and people of African descent were often subject to re-enslavement and sale. Whitfield also recovers significant enslaved energy in bringing an end to the practice of slavery, citing their running away and filing of court cases as the stuff around which White abolitionists and sympathetic judges built their opposition. In continuity with his earlier work, he demonstrates that the end of slavery saw the rise of virulent systemic racism, as cheap, free Black labour eventually became more economically feasible than chattel slavery.21

10 In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a new history of capitalism might profitably move beyond the tragedy-of-Confederation narrative by also looking to evolving patterns of domestic and reproductive labour as well as increasingly intense colonial dispossession.22 As Maritime feminist historiography has established, while the “separate spheres” ideology and the emergence of maternal feminism might seem to be indicative of a certain period of progressive capitalist modernity, these conceptual categories obscure as much as they reveal about the actual workings of a sharpening, if messy, class system and the central role of domestic labour within the Atlantic economy.23 On the dispossession front, historians like Daniel Paul, William Wicken, and Peter Twohig have amply demonstrated that the industrialization of places like Sydney, Cape Breton, was predicated on the removal and control of a Mi’kmaw population in a particularly fragile economic and social state.24

11 Crucially, on the question of deindustrialization, a new history of capitalism in the Maritimes would not need to entirely abandon frameworks that seek to understand core-periphery relations and to problematize resource extraction. But the axis needs to be expanded in order not only to understand East-West “relations of extraction” but also to look at productive links along global North-South supply chains and to re-centre environmental factors and engage in a more complex manner with the internal logic of primary resource economies.25 Doing so would in turn allow historians of Maritime capitalism and labour to move beyond the field’s tendency to focus on the urban, and therefore to get at the multitude of complex and contradictory connections between rural and urban modes of production driving the regional economy. Focusing on these factors might also profitably enable historians of the Maritimes to move beyond their to-date rather superficial analysis of the region’s experience of the process of neoliberal globalization. While the underdevelopment framework generates helpful insights about the unequal nature of economic production within the Canadian federation, it allows for little complexity in understanding the Maritimes’ contradictory, hegemonic-yet-subordinate role within the broader system of global capitalism, leading to unfortunate comparisons of Eastern provinces to the oppressed nations of the Global South.26

12 Another hallmark of the “new history of capitalism” literature is its Marxish focus on the “relationship between market, state, and society,” and its concomitant analysis of the links between governance, extraction, and financialization of capital.27 There are many disparate threads floating around in the historiography of Maritime state formation and development: the state’s colonial roots,28 its central role in the articulation of the Canadian liberal order and systems of industrial legality,29 its gendered character and its location as a site of struggle and a social formation under active construction by professionalizing women,30 its place within a broader Canadian hegemonic struggle over the plight of the regions and the nature of federalism,31 its evolving responsibility as steward and arbiter of disputes over land use and policy,32 and its often-failed role as a high modernist motor of industrial economic development.33

13 Ian McKay, for his part, has posited that “A new history of politics – focused on political theory, ideological development and state-formation – is reshaping our understanding of the Canadian experience; and the Atlantic Region will likely play a central role in this research programme.”34 A broad history of state formation and economic development in the Maritimes would necessarily need to ground itself in Elizabeth Mancke-type analysis of the colonial roots of governance in the region, analyzing the ways in which its integration into a powerful 19th-century Atlantic World imperial governance structure influenced the development of its political classes.35 There is much to learn, here, I think, about Maritime political traditions of external dependency and authoritarian government practices. This would also necessarily involve an examination of a political culture oriented around access to and control of Crown resources, and the concomitant differing patterns of state formation in Maritime provinces according to the available supply of Crown land.36 If we can for a moment quiet the ghost of E.R. Forbes, this may help us in turn to understand the importance of networks of political patronage in the democratic structures of the region. And lest we fall into the trap of thinking these patterns of competition over resource control are safely ensconced in the “colonial period,” we need to balance McKay’s observations about the region’s place in the architecture of the liberal order against the continued prevalence of often profoundly illiberal 18th-century patterns rooted in war, settlement, and struggles over resources.37 As William Wicken points out, “In Nova Scotia [as compared to the Canadas], European settlers dispossessed families without the Crown attempting to protect the Mi’kmaq or to extinguish their title.”38 The impacts of this approach continue be felt.

14 In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, any attempt to understand anew state formation and development would need to extend this analysis while paying particular attention to the state as a locus of struggle of competing class and gender interests, and consider seriously the ongoing impact of colonial governance patterns in maintaining and enforcing racial segregation. This would involve not only deeper studies of industrial legality and the central role of women in the messy process of “making up the state,” but also a reengagement with the project begun by historians like William Wicken and Peter Twohig that emphasizes settler-Indigenous relations as a site for understanding the Maritime state’s development of techniques of governance and control.39 It would also need to reckon with labour historiography’s establishment of a distinct Maritime tradition of social democracy and its impact on the overall politics of the region.40

15 Finally, such an effort would need to engage with the broader history of capitalism in the region in order to begin to better understand the post-1945 emphasis on modernity and development in the political generation of Smallwood, Hatfield, and Stanfield. What was the particular balance of class forces – regionally, nationally, and transnationally – that made these modernizers so fervently pursue such obviously flawed industrial development schemes? This would require not only a re-engagement with the regional underdevelopment literature but also an attempt to generate an understanding of the mentalité of political and business elites in small, subnational polities trying to reckon with the fickle headwinds of global and national economic trends. I suspect that a better understanding of the Atlantic Canadian state and its actors in the 1960s and 1970s would help in the project of generating new insights into the regional experience of the rise of neoliberal globalization.

16 In short, the central insights of underdevelopment scholarship – that the fate of the Maritimes has always been tied up in a world-scale struggle over resources, and that this struggle has manifested itself in the political structures governing the region – still hold enormous promise for understanding our history. Multiple advances in understanding the nature of settler colonialism and racial apartheid in the region, feminist insights into the importance of the reproductive sphere in shifting class relations, and the impetus within the “new history of capitalism” literature toward destabilizing traditional shibboleths around periodization and resource production can help historians of the Maritimes not only to better understand the nature and evolution of capitalism, but also to mount a case that regional history is not dead and perhaps even more important than ever.