Mccalla, Douglas. the Upper Canada Trade, 1834-1872: a Study of the Buchanans' Business. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979
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Document generated on 09/30/2021 2:48 p.m. Urban History Review Revue d'histoire urbaine McCalla, Douglas. The Upper Canada Trade, 1834-1872: A Study of the Buchanans' Business. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Pp. viii, 231. Tables. $15.00 Peter George Volume 9, Number 3, February 1981 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1019302ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1019302ar See table of contents Publisher(s) Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine ISSN 0703-0428 (print) 1918-5138 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this review George, P. (1981). Review of [McCalla, Douglas. The Upper Canada Trade, 1834-1872: A Study of the Buchanans' Business. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Pp. viii, 231. Tables. $15.00]. Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine, 9(3), 93–95. https://doi.org/10.7202/1019302ar All Rights Reserved © Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine, 1981 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS >V *V >'c * >V HAMILTON BETWEEN THE COVERS handsome new library and civic market building. At the rate of research and^ writing currently underway in J.C. Weaver steeltown, it would not be Department of History surprising to find the above title McMaster University gracing a study of fertility set in the ambitious city. In addition to * * * the five titles reviewed below, there are at least four more McCalla, Douglas. The Upper Canada volumes in process and what Trade, 1834-1872: A Study of the promises to be an excellent Buchanans' Business. Toronto: dissertation on labour from 1896 to University of Toronto Press, 1979. 1930 by Craig Heron. The McMaster Pp. viii, 231. Tables. $15.00. Labour Studies Institute is sponsoring the publication of a Drawing heavily on the visual history of Hamilton labour, Buchanan Papers and other primary the Hamilton volume in the sources, Professor McCalla has History of Canadian Cities painstakingly chronicled the growth Series is nearing completion, and and decline of the Buchanans1 Michael Katz soon goes to press wholesale merchant business. Peter with his second volume. Canadian and Isaac Buchanan founded the historians should not forget that business in Glasgow and Toronto in his social history project produced 1834, and expanded westwards into reports, articles, and Hamilton in 1840, in part to dissertations that have added to prevent Montreal-based merchant our store of scholarship and houses from wresting the trade from scholars. A group of local their hands. Hamilton was soon to historians with the involvement of become the centre of their Canadian university and Dictionary of operations. By the mid-1840s, the Canadian Biography personnel business had expanded and resident in Hamilton have prepared diversified from its initial a manuscript dictionary of Hamilton emphasis on dry goods to a larger, biography up to 1875. The Hamilton more complex, general wholesaling Historical Board manages three firm with hardware and grocery properties in the city, including departments as well. Indeed, by Dundurn Castle, and has opened the mid-1850s, the Buchanan firm exhibitions on architectural was among the largest business in history in all three. Heritage Canada, with an annual volume Hamilton, a private group which has approaching $2 million in 18 56 (p. financially assisted the 1). Although the firm had suffered restoration of several dwellings of setbacks in earlier recessions, the architectural merit, is planning a financial crisis of 1857-58 began walking-tour booklet. The long the firm on its downward slide. suffering Hamilton collection, a According to McCalla, the end of fine regional archive squeezed for extensive growth in Ontario and years onto the balcony of a bank failures in management - Peter building leased by the Hamilton Buchanan's death in 1860 was a Public Library, now moves into the serious blow - explain the firm's 93 - 94 troubled financial history and fundamental economic institution in eventual bankruptcy in 1867. Even Canada at the foot of the after Isaac reopened the business long-credit pyramid, selling all on a more limited basis, the firm1 s forms of imported merchandise, financial problems proved acting as a conduit for export intractable, and it lapsed into commodities, and serving as the final bankruptcy in 1872. principal source of local credit. In fact, debt played a critical McCalla does more than provide role for the wholesale merchant in a detailed history of the firm. cementing retail connections which His book emphasizes the critical even survived partnership role of the British export trade reorganizations. Yet our knowledge and its institutions in the growth of local economic development in and conduct of business in Ontario still suffers from the nineteenth-century Canada. Not failure to identify the only were the export/import relationship between mercantile merchants predominant in trade, but credit and the growth of the they helped promote the development banki ng system. What explains the of banks and insurance companies, pattern of expansion of branch railroads, and even local industry. banking? Did local merchants But, a word of caution. Although monopolize credit availability McCalla describes the nature of the until a critical volume was business environment within which reached, at which point the banks the wholesale merchant operated, it moved in? McCalla points out that is far from clear that the 1 the shift was well underway by the Buchanans business was in any 1870s and undoubtedly adversely sense typical or representative in affected the traditional conduct of terms of entrepreneurial mercantile business, but the perceptions of and responses to interactions remain unclear. investment opportunities and external business shocks. Many features of the Canadian mercantile system were evident in In many ways, the critical the Buchanans1 firm, including ingredient in the successful their concentration on wholesaling conduct of nineteenth-century (retail trade was left to business was the avoidance of risk. specialized retail merchants), Risks were high, in large part their reliance on the supply because businessmen lacked concrete account system (which, when information upon which to base successfully practised with sound business decisions and favourable credit terms and price because institutional rigidities concessions, provided for a virtual helped convert minor liquidity monopoly of the retailer' s problems into widespread commercial business), and their ruthless crises. Economic vulnerability to paring of weak retailers (although the vagaries of world markets was the choice between expansion and exacerbated by the chain of retrenchment was most often decided long-term credit - from British by the state of the trade cycle). suppliers of manufactured goods, to However, we learn relatively little wholesale merchants to retail about the actual administration of merchants, and on to their the Buchanans' business - customers in rural and small-town accounting procedures, office Ontario. McCalla reminds us that organization, pricing policies, the general store was the etc. Were the Buchanans innovators 95 - in business practice? Did the 1979. Pp. 354. Tables, figures, Buchanans help to diffuse new illustrations. $27 .50. business techniques throughout the Canadian business community? Cluttering a review with personal anecdotes is perhaps Above all, the firmTs history self-indulgent, but I will persist illustrates the critical role of because Harvey Graff's The Literacy personality in determining business Myth invites such comparisons. My success or failure, at a time when grandfather (1878-1968) was a the sole proprietorship and teamster who married young, raised limited partnership were the a large family, owned his own home, organizational norms. Risks were a stable, horses, and a variety of kept to a tolerable level by vehicles. He was never unemployed judicious selection of partners, and even employed other teamsters agents, and employees, often drawn from time to time. He was also from the merchant's "extended illiterate. He would never admit family." Yet the system was it, nor did he need to. My fraught with error, as a list of grandmother taught him to write his the BuchanansT agents and partners name, though he did not know what testifies. For the Buchanans, he had written, and he signed it to success or failure was undoubtedly documents (the decennial census decided by the personalities of the return for example) which she read two principals: Peter, cautious, aloud and completed for him. The responsible, and decidedly advent of radio vastly expanded his risk-averse; and Isaac, "a conversational abilities, but, commercial knight errant" (p. 90) apart from the obviously painful who continually urged expansion and exigences of social discourse, he indulged his enthusiasm for "public was perfectly at home in his affairs" at the direct expense of essentially nineteenth-century his business responsibilities. world and domestic attachments. This implausible business pairing was likely rendered tolerable to My purpose in relating