Prairie Capitalism

This collection of 35 readings on Canadian prairie history includes overview interpretation and current research on topics such as the fur trade, native peoples, ethnic groups, status of women, urban and rural society, the Great Depression and literature and art.

Sylvester challenges the view in prairie historiography that agriculture had commercialized before the west was opened to settlement, and that ethnic communities alone resisted the market's potential.

A history of the Canadian prairie provinces from the days of Native-European contact to the 1980s.

Landscapes of the Northern Great Plains have been constantly changing, but never so rapidly as under modern conditions of economic affluence and technological development. This change is multifaceted and has an impact not only on the fabric of culture and its perception of landscape, but also on the ecology and physical landforms. Multidisciplinary research has therefore become an important tool in identifying the influences that human activities have, not only on cultural landscapes but on biophysical ones as well. This collection of articles, originating in a conference held at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in April 2000, focuses on just such an integration of research concerning the Great Plains of North America and involving the disciplines of geology, archaeology, biology, geography, sociology, and agriculture.

The Canadian prairies are often envisioned as dry, windswept fields; however, much of southern Manitoba is not arid plain but wet prairie, poorly drained land subject to frequent flooding. Shannon Stunden Bower brings to light the complexities of surface-water management in Manitoba, from early artificial drainage efforts to late-twentieth-century attempts at watershed management. She engages scholarship on the state, liberalism, and bioregionalism in order to probe the connections between human and environmental change in the wet prairie. This account of an overlooked aspect of the region’s environmental history reveals how the biophysical nature of southern Manitoba has been an important factor in the formation of Manitoba society and the provincial state.

The massive changes under way in capitalist commodity production include the transition from a traditional or Fordist approach to a post-Fordist one, involving practices such as employee involvement, continuous improvement, and gainsharing. In this research monograph, Bob Russell explores the changing character of industrial relations and labour processes in two staple industries: potash and uranium mining. Using an innovative case-analytic approach, Russell compares the managerial strategies used by five transnational firms. As indicated by his title, More with Less, he sees the shift toward post-Fordism as having more to do with the intensification of labour, accomplished in part through the creation of multitasked positions, than with worker empowerment and the transcendence of class conflict. Russell combines extensive empirical analysis with a review of contemporary writing on work relations and labour processes to provide this intensive political-economic perspective on the capital-labour relation. His meticulous research will interest scholars and professionals in Canada, the United States, Britain, Europe, and Australia.