Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century: Formations and Legacies of Industrial Capitalism

Separated from mainland Nova Scotia by the Strait of Canso, Cape Breton is a small, rugged island. Among the most eastern points of North America, it straddles the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean. Home to Indigenous peoples from time immemorial, it has been a site of sustained European activity since the late fifteenth century. An early base for migrants engaged in a multijurisdictional migratory fishery, the island may have been named in honor of the many Breton fishermen who used it as a temporary home each year. In the decades and centuries that followed, the uses, inhabitants, and claimants to the island changed in a mutually shaping relationship with shifting global economic circumstances and geopolitical rivalries and competition. Building from recent scholarship focused on the intertwined processes of colonial expansion and the development of capitalism in North America, the contributors to this volume explore the transformation of the island during “the long twentieth century,” a period from the 1860s to just after the millennium.The volume consists of two parts, the first of which, “Formations,” opens with Don Nerbas’s chapter. He considers the expansion of coal mining in Cape Breton in the middling years of the nineteenth century. This carefully crafted essay illustrates well the centrality of the merchant elite and the imperial networks they drew on to shape the direction of the Cape Breton economy in an early era of fossil fuel–driven accumulation. Coal, along with steel, served as drivers of change within the local social, economic, cultural, and demographic orders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The next four chapters explore aspects of that shifting landscape. John Reid focuses on leisure, with his analysis of cricket providing insight into the complex ways that sport reflected and served as a bridge across lines of race, class, and gender among the diverse settler collective drawn to the island largely by opportunities in coal and steel industries. Claudine Bonner, Ronald Labelle, and Martha Walls highlight how the longer and wider history of transformation in the “European Age” echoed through and shaped Cape Breton’s social history in the early twentieth century. Bonner considers how residents of African descent responded to racism and exclusion by founding local institutions that served their own needs. Her attention is especially on the establishment of an African Orthodox Church and a branch of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Labelle reminds us of the enduring importance of the “French fact” as he explores the persistence and challenges to Cape Breton’s Acadian community. Walls, who rounds out the first part of the volume, focuses on the island’s first peoples, the Mi’kmaq, with her emphasis on the centrality of gender and women to the conversations and strategies through which settler governments removed Indigenous peoples from Sydney, the island’s main urban center.Part 2 of the volume—“Legacies”—focuses mainly on the period after World War II. David Frank’s essay focuses on C. B. Wade, research director of District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America, the district of the international union that represented workers in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Wade’s case, and his eventual dismissal from the union, illustrates well the postwar tendency for once-radical unions bent on social transformation to transform themselves into pillars of a managerial capitalist order. Beyond documenting an important drift in industrial relations, Frank’s essay provides a segue to the final decades of the long twentieth century. Ken Donovan’s chapter on Dutch war bride Ella Barron explores the limitations and opportunities available to rural women in Cape Breton in the later twentieth century. Heather Sparling, Lachlan Mackinnon, Will Langford, and Anna Louise Semple and Del Muise examine aspects of the deindustrialization of Cape Breton. An examination of strikes and union rivalry in the twilight years of coal mining in Cape Breton, Mackinnon’s essay is most squarely focused on this topic and pairs well with Nerbas’s earlier chapter. The two essays explore the expansion and the demise of key industries on the island. They also point to the centrality of shifts within the wider global capitalist order as driving and shaping the making and unmaking of the island’s industrial economy. Through an analysis of the uses of Gaelic song collections, Sparling considers how these significant transformations were handled in cultural terms. Langford and Semple and Muise assess different development efforts—aquaculture and tourism, respectively—as officials and their community allies sought to adapt to a postindustrial reality.The essays in this volume cover a wide array of topics. Nevertheless, the editors deftly link the contributions in a helpful introductory chapter. Industry and empire provide the main connective tissue here. Cape Breton’s story in the long nineteenth century is centrally about the rise and decline of industrial capitalism. The vicissitudes of capitalist transformation on the island took shape against a longer and wider history of colonial expansion and exploitation. Dispossession, labor recruitment, internal divisions, inequities and iniquities, bases for solidarity, linguistic practice, modes of identification, and the character of class struggle itself all took root in a world transformed by those earlier developments. In turn, industrialization and deindustrialization captured, uprooted, and transformed Cape Breton, and the legacies of those processes and the wider global changes linked to them are still unfolding before us. As Alvin Finkel’s afterword reminds, the story of Cape Breton in the long twentieth century is distinct but not at all unique. The titanic transformations that have made and remade the island have indeed made and remade the planet. This volume will appeal to historians and others focused on Cape Breton and Atlantic Canada. It also will be of interest to scholars of the wider themes mentioned already. Moreover, the essays are carefully researched and written in an engaging style. I can imagine assigning them singly or collectively to undergraduate and graduate students.