The latest entry in our continuing series of commentaries marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Mel Watkins' classic article, "A Staple Theory of Economic Growth,"
we present the following contribution by Mel's long-time collaborator,
Marjorie Griffin Cohen. Marjorie considers the gender dimensions of
staple analysis.
Feminism was the unlikely route for my contact with
the staples theory. I say 'unlikely' because staples development
analysis has a structural amnesia to gendered issues. Still,
understanding the distinct ways that Canada developed had significant
implications for the atypical way labour and gender were configured in
the historical development process.
Interest in women's role in economic development had been in abeyance
for a long time after the British feminists early in the 20th century
became focused on women's past -- specifically women's contributions to
the 18th-century industrial revolution. In the early analysis of
industrialization, women's work was understood (both by feminists and
others) to be integral to industrial development in Europe, primarily
because women were so very central to the proto-industrial stage of
family manufacturing (this is also referred to as the 'putting-out'
system where family manufactured clothing and other items from material
provided by an industrialist. See, for example, Hans Medick 1976), but
also because of their dominance in the early factory systems (See, for
example Pinchbeck 1930, Smelser 1959, Collier 1964, Engels 184.
Until the beginning of development literature (dealing with
underdevelopment in poor countries) the British understanding of
capitalist development was more or less the general understanding of
industrial revolutions. So too were the labour and family configurations
associated with them. As feminism was gaining a tiny toehold in
universities in Canada in the 1970s and '80s, those of us exploring how
to teach the Canadian economic past from a gendered perspective had
almost no material to use. The research in Canada and the U.S. simply
had not yet been done, so the only written scholarly work available
related to an earlier literature of what had happened in England and
Europe. This clearly did not explain women's role in development in
Canada -- in any way whatsoever. At that time the push to have Canadian
subjects taught in Canadian universities (spearheaded by Robin Matthews
and Mel Watkins) made me realize I could not focus on European women,
but absolutely had to find out how women figured in the shaping of
Canada (The dominance of English and American academics in the social
sciences in particular had hindered the development of a vigorous
research of Canadian issues. This was corrected, as universities were
required to offer jobs to qualified Canadians first. Unfortunately, this
law, which was so hard-won, was changed early in the 21st century).
This is where Mel Watkin's work on staples development comes in. I
was new to Canada and since I came from the U.S., knew absolutely
nothing about Canadian history, much less its economic development.
Someone directed me to Mel's work on the staples theory. It immediately
made sense that such an enormous country with a tiny population that was
focused on exporting mostly primary products should have a distinct
economic growth pattern. I read everyone Mel referred to in the piece,
including Innis and Mackintosh. Mackintosh's cheerful approach, that
staples export would be the positive path to more diversified
development, contrasted starkly with that of Innis whose darker analysis
of the significance of the characteristics of the commodity itself and
the tendency toward wildly fluctuating economic activity seemed a much
more realistic version of what actually occurred. Mel's theorizing
applied the concept of linkages (backward, forward, final demand
linkages) to the Canadian case. What became obvious through Mel's
analysis is that what mattered most was whether these linkages were
reaped within Canada or elsewhere, and how public policy could make the
difference in taming the volatility of a staples economy: to the extent
that public policy submits to the 'boom and bust psychology' of staples
export development, the more unstable the economy was likely to be. Mel
was clear that growth and economic instability would be less at the
mercy of destiny if planning is accomplished to strengthen linkages.
At first I was interested in seeing how women 'fit into' Canadian
economic development by examining the nature of women's labour in both
staples production and the agricultural/subsistence sector. The first
two excellent and serious studies dealing with women in staple
development were focused on aboriginal women in the fur trade. These
were Sylvia Van Kirk's book, Many Tender Ties, and Jennifer Brown's
book, Strangers in the Blood. Both were published in 1980 and showed how
central aboriginal women were to the success of the fur trade,
regarding both market-oriented production and re-production of the fur
trade labour force (or maintaining 'social reproduction,' as it is now
termed). Around this time H. Clare Pentland's book on Capital and Labour
in Canada 1650 -1860 came out, and it was the first to focus on the
significance of labour organization in a staples economy, where finding
an adequate labour supply was a monumentally difficult issue. Pentland
referred to early labour productive relations as 'patriarchal' because
of the need for the employer to assume the reproductive overhead of the
workers, even when there was relatively little work, just in order to
keep people alive.
But understanding how the population grew and maintained itself
during periods of violent economic fluctuations and how the economy grew
despite these wild swings meant not just seeing how women 'fit in' to
an already understood growth pattern. Rather, I found, including an
analysis of what most people were doing changed ideas about how capital
accumulation occurred in the early periods.
There were clues all over the place about how to understand labour
and women's role in early development, particularly if one examined
early records with the intent of specifically looking for these issues.
Ideas from other scholars also provided other methods of examining the
staple's relationship to the wider economy. These included Vernon Fowke,
who was interested in disputing the sense that pre-industrial
agriculturalists were primarily self-sufficient, but instead were
initially and continuously reliant on an exchange and monetary economy.
In Quebec Louise Dechene and Jean Hamelin pointed out that even in the
earliest periods only a small proportion of labour was directly involved
in the staple-exporting sector, which meant that other forms of
economic activity had been dominant. And there were the accounts of
women themselves that could be read, both to understand what types of
work they did and how they and the men in their families understood the
significance of their work (see for example Dunlop 1889, Jameson 1838,
Moodie 1855, Rose 1911, Traill 1855).
By looking at what most people were doing and including women's
labour in the mix, their significance in the whole project of capital
accumulation became more apparent. The extraordinary volatility of the
staple economy was a starting point for understanding the nature of
productive relations, both those in the market and those within the
family. It became obvious, as I learned more, that patriarchal
productive relations were just as significant in capital accumulation as
were capitalist productive relations. Ultimately I wrote a book on this
issue, using the staple thesis as my starting point, with the intent of
showing how non-market productive relations could be crucial to
economic growth and development (This book is Women's Work, Markets, and
Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. It was primarily
the work I had done for my PhD thesis.) Also, understanding the gendered
nature of economic growth in Canada could add a different take on the
shape of staples development and how its volatility was managed within
households.
As I said initially, Mel's article on the staples theory was
immensely influential to my thinking about the gender order in Canada in
its earlier periods. But some assertions seem worth questioning now (in
hindsight). Two points that Mel mentions as being important for
development are worthy of note. First is the idea that Canada had a
favourable 'land/man' ratio; second is the notion that because Canada
was largely a settler society, it did not have inhibiting traditions of
the sort that restricted development elsewhere. With labour issues
always so very significant because of the low population, it would seem
to me that this 'land/man ratio' was actually a negative factor. So much
land, with so few people, meant that domestic markets were very slow to
development. Also, while the gender order was in many ways shaped by
the special circumstances of Canada's geography and staple exports,
importing labour was necessary to solve the labour problem. Each wave of
European immigrants brought a reinforcement of very traditional
gendered relationships. And these tended to retard the various ways that
women had been integrated into the staples exporting economy. The
effect of English's women's immigration on aboriginal women in the fur
trade was most obvious, but so too were the traditions from other waves
of immigrations from elsewhere in Britain and Europe.
The significance of export staples to understanding what is most
important for the economy in Canada has had resurgence with new
developments in the energy industry. I live in B.C., and here the
reliance on staples exports is well entrenched as part of the collective
unconscious of policy makers. For example, I recently attended a
high-level one-day conference assessing future economic directions in
B.C. The general sense was that the priority was to generate wealth
through gas development and exports (in the form of liquefied natural
gas), assumed by most to be a precondition for allocating funds to the
things people need. It seems odd, but there exists an embedded idea that
wealth is only created through resources -- and everything else derives
from that. At no point is there recognition of the huge risks of
relying on one export staple for future economic success.
Mel Watkins' "A Staple Theory of Economic Growth" was an inspiration
to many of us who used it as a basis for further research into Canada's
economic nature. It inspired subsequent researchers and students, and is
a great article to use in teaching. It thoroughly engages students in a
way that nothing else on Canadian economic history can do: they
appreciate its clarity and immediately see its relevance to the economy
today. The staples theory is as alive and relevant in Canada now, as it
was when Mel wrote it 50 years ago. If only those in charge of the
economy would heed the analysis that Mel and others gave us, they would
be much more conscious of the risks inherent in a staples-dependent
approach to growth. Those who design economic policy for governments
should have a wider perspective than relying on the deepening
exploitation of resources. Attention needs to shift to economic activity
that meets the needs of people within this country.
Source
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/progressive-economics-forum/2013/11/staple-theory-50-staples-theory-its-gendered-natu 
