Critical Analysis of:Gerald Tulchinsky, “The Montreal Business Community, 1837-1853”
... instance: Yet the fifteen years from the late 1830s to the early 1850s, though only a stage, was for them [Montreal’s business community] a highly productive and profitable era, when they broadened their interests extensively from commerce to a wide range of enterprises that dealt in insurance, banking, mining, and gas works, besides the various shipping, railway and industrial firms.(1) He then makes a good inference from the information about why Montreal, between the 1830s and 1850s, suffered economic losses but switched from an older industry to the new way of insurance, banking, mining, gas works, and railways shipping manufactured goods. Tulchinsky guesses correctly that the fur trade was in decline at this time, and this reality prompted several of Montreal’s businessmen to create new industries or to engage in newly emerging industries. He lists the facts that support his ambiguous thesis, which he states as for example: This group [or Montreal’s business community], in short, tended to concentrate its directorial activity and local corporate investments in railway companies and shipping, and in one of the commercial banks, usually the Bank of Montreal.(2) …George Auldjo personified the transitional entrepreneurship of Montreal in that era of the rapid decline of one Canadian staple and the rise of others. Though connected by marriage to John Richardson, a leading partner in one of the firms dominant in the North West Company, and though his own firm (in operation as early as 1785 under John Auldjo, another brother) had undoubtedly participated in the fur trade, George was deeply involved in Montreal’s newer commercial affairs. He and George Garden, another partner, were both directors of the Bank of Montreal during the 1820s and, as a sideline to their general merchandising business, (specializing in wines, spirits and dry goods) they acted as Montreal agents for two foreign insurance companies. George Auldjo was the owner of considerable real estate in Montreal besides.(3) As...