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Commerce in a Cold Climate: Bliss on Canadian Business History

Northern Enterprise is an unusual kind of book, on several counts. First, it is offered as a public celebration of business, by one particular enterprise (it was sponsored by an insurance company), but on behalf of business in general. Second, the intended audience is that elusive trade market of general readers; thus the book is neither a text nor a monograph. Third, in an age of privatization it is advanced, by the author at least, as "a model for other private funding of scholarly writing in Canada" (p. 7). It is, as we shall see, something of a close ideological fit as well. In effect, Northern Enterprise attempts nothing less than a complete rewriting of Canadian history for the commercial market, putting business in the center of the picture. Because Michael Bliss attempts to survey the entire panorama of five centuries of Canadian business, the vast bulk of the book consists of a carefully crafted cavalcade of rising and falling enterprises. More than half of the book concerns itself with developments before 1900; in the latter half it covers roughly a decade per chapter, each chapter being organized around a general theme. Bliss shows great ingenuity in weaving a vast quantity of diverse material into synoptic paragraphs of sometimes unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, for example, the chapter entitled "At War with Business" surveys not just business in the Great War, but also, working the pun, the tension in business ethics between success and service, the limits of philanthropy, the three generations problem, work discipline, unionization, antitrust legislation, the beginnings of economic regulation, and public ownership of utilities. Bliss cleverly works everything in. Sometimes the passing parade becomes a blur; sometimes the treatment seems a trifle thin. Anticipating the criticism that certain items ought to be examined in greater depth, he demands of his critics a list of what ought to be taken out. A good point, but on the other hand a less grandiose, more selective organizing principle would have permitted more penetrating analysis of representative or more generally illuminating cases. As it stands, this