Adapting to Decline: The Changing Business World of the Bourgeoisie in Saint John, NB , in the 1920s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The regional economic crisis that descended upon the Maritimes in the 1920s wrought considerable change to the business world of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in Saint John, NB . While Maritime historiography - shaped, as Ian McKay has observed, by the ‘themes of dependency, underdevelopment and metropolis/hinterland interaction’ - has tended to portray the 1920s as a period of decline and crisis for the region’s business leaders, the experience of bourgeois Saint John suggests that the period was also one of important economic transformation. Drawing upon a variety of sources, including the business and local press, company papers, and other archival materials, this article analyses the ways in which bourgeois Saint John residents adapted their accumulation and development strategies to the changing economic circumstances of the decade. The city’s bourgeoisie moved away from the old political economy of urban industrialization, and towards an emerging political economy that centred on tourist promotion and resource development, and was more dependent upon state intervention and outside capital. In step with these developments, finance capital became a more important force in local business life, evident by the ascendance of financier Howard P. Robinson, while nationally competitive manufacturers such as Lewis Simms and the McAvity family continued to manage successful local enterprises. Collectively, bourgeois Saint John adapted to broader changes in Canadian capitalism during the 1920s, which produced a more ambiguous brand of ‘community-minded entrepreneurship’ than in past decades and set the stage for future developments. La crise économique régionale qui s’abat sur les Provinces maritimes dans les années 1920 transforme le milieu des affaires dans lequel évolue la bourgeoisie entrepreneuriale de Saint-Jean, au Nouveau-Brunswick. L’historiographie des Maritimes – marquée, comme l’a noté Ian McKay, par « les thèmes de la dépendance, du sous-développement et de l’interaction métropole-hinterland » – a tendance à présenter les années 1920 comme une période de crise et de déclin pour les principaux hommes d’affaires de la région. Mais l’expérience des bourgeois de Saint-Jean laisse entendre que ce fut aussi une période de transformations économiques importantes. À partir d’une variété de sources, entre autres la presse locale et d’affaires et les archives des compagnies, cet article étudie la manière dont les bourgeois de Saint-Jean adaptèrent leurs stratégies d’accumulation et de développement aux changements économiques de la décennie. La bourgeoisie délaissa la vieille économie politique de l’industrialisation urbaine et évolua vers une nouvelle économie politique centrée sur la promotion du tourisme et le développement des ressources. Elle accrut sa dépendance envers les interventions étatiques et le capital extérieur. En phase avec cette évolution, le capital financier prit plus d’importance dans la vie économique locale, comme le montre l’ascendant du financier Howard P. Robinson, tandis que des manufacturiers d’envergure nationale comme Lewis Simms et la famille McAvity continuèrent de gérer des entreprises locales prospères. Collectivement, le Saint-Jean bourgeois s’adapte à l’évolution générale du capitalisme canadien dans les années 1920. Il en résulte une forme plus ambiguë d’entrepreneurship orienté vers la communauté que dans les décennies précédentes, et l’amorce de changements subséquents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".