Abstract for Canadian Banking History
A Summary of What I Want to Accomplish with this Blog
As an undergraduate, I attended the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Schulich School of Business has one of the best reputations — perhaps even the best reputation — among all the business schools in Canada. I think it is fair to say that when recruiting students the Schulich School of Business routinely attracts the best of the best.
But as I learned from the original Top Gun movie, arrogance is a good thing to have as a fighter pilot. I think it is also a good thing to have as a businessperson. In the final analysis, capitalism is a system of ruthlessly separating the winners from the losers using the profit and loss system, so I think it makes the most sense to approach the practice of capitalism with the desire to be the winner, and not the loser.
So in this spirit of becoming better than the best of the best, I offer up my blog, Canadian Banking History. This is my contribution to making the curriculum of the Schulich School of Business better than it already is.
Freshmen undergraduates are required to take a course called Business History and Ethics, which consists of one semester of Canadian business history and one semester of business ethics. I disliked this course, and so my blog is my attempt to redesign the course and make it better.
So what did I dislike about the course? First of all, I suspect that the author of the textbook, John Dwyer, is a socialist or a communist or some sort of radical leftist who actually dislikes business and the business world. This is fairly easy to see by simply looking at his sources. In addition to his frequent praise of Karl Marx, he cites Eric Hobsbawm (I remember him from my first year political science course taught by my openly socialist professor), Thorstein Veblen (another well known critic of capitalism), Robert Heilbroner (another well known socialist author) and Canada’s very own R. T. Naylor (made famous by his book The History of Canadian Business, 1867-1914). I find it odd that this leftist cast of characters are the ones utilized by the author to teach highly motivated business students.
A much more important criticism, and ultimately the inspiration behind my blog, is that John Dwyer seems to totally ignore Canadian banking history. To me, ignoring banking history is a big, gigantic, gaping hole in his textbook. It also makes no logical sense. The Schulich School of Business is located literally in the heart of Canada’s financial capital, the city of Toronto. Toronto’s Bay Street operates as Canada’s version of Wall Street. As an undergraduate in my junior year, for example, I remember heading downtown and going up to the (I think it was) forty-fourth floor of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and given a short opportunity to play around with the Bloomberg terminals. Students go to business school to learn about exciting topics such as the stock market, the bond market, interest rates, exchange rates, and ultimately how to make a lot of money. They are not attending business school to learn about why Marx thinks women are the “possessions of and ornaments for their husbands”1 in a capitalist society.
So here is what I would do if I were writing a business history textbook to be used by undergraduates at the Schulich School of Business. I would organize the entire textbook around Canadian banking history. This would give me a simple and easy way to organize the chapters of my textbook based on the chronological development of the banking industry. The Canadian banking industry dealt with and interacted with all the other major players brought up by Dwyer (for example, the railroads, the colonial governments, the British government) and dealt with all the major incidents of Canadian history that Dwyer addressed (for example, the Great Depression, Canadian Confederation), so I would retain the same basic content.
However, my approach to writing Canadian business history will have certain advantages over Dwyer’s approach to writing Canadian business history. My approach will show that it is certainly possible to operate businesses under a lightly regulated regime closer to the laissez-faire approach, thus refuting Dwyer’s interminable pessimism about the free enterprise system. This is because Canada’s banking history is dominated by one glaring fact, namely, the success of the free market’s system of money, also known as the gold standard. I think it is really important to refute Dwyer’s many pessimistic and many hostile claims against the operation of the free market economy, and I believe that my writing framework will allow me to do just that. Secondly, my approach is much more appropriate for the target audience. The students recruited by the Schulich School of Business are likely to end up working in Toronto’s financial industry when they graduate, so they will find a history textbook about the industry they will be working in much more relevant to their future career. They will also find it much more engaging. From my own personal experience, I find reading Canadian history from the point of view of the banks and other financial institutions (especially the central banks) much more engaging. Everything I know about Canadian banking history is the result of me teaching myself, so I believe that my approach is one that will produce highly self-motivated readers of Canadian business history. The ultimate purpose then of my blog is for me to work on developing the content of what could I suppose become a future textbook for future business students at the Schulich School of Business.
John Dwyer, Business History: Canada in the Global Community (North York: Captus Press, 1999), 180.