Mark Kuhlberg studies the conjunction of industry, finance, politics, and the natural environment in this fascinating survey of the management of timber resources in Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kuhlberg contests the influential thesis of H. V. Nelles's The Politics of Development (1974), which presented “the government as a client of industry” and charged that provincial officials responsible for resource management became, in their pursuit of growth, the intimate partners of big business in a “joint public and private venture” (p. 109). Pulp and paper mills would in fact become the most important economic users of the province's trees by the 1920s, as well as Ontario's most important provider of wages, employer of labor, and recipient of investment capital. But twenty years of research has led Kuhlberg to conclude that relations between officials and industrialists were characterized more frequently by conflict than by cooperation. Drawing heavily from correspondence and contracts of the period, as well as the commentary of industry publications, Kuhlberg illustrates that the government frequently rebuffed the demands of industrialists hoping to tap the spruce timber and hydroelectric potential of Ontario, offering them scant assistance and even controlling and restricting their operations in order to safeguard other electoral goals and patronage relationships.

Producing newsprint from wood rather than rag became increasingly popular as the patent for the process expired in the 1880s. The strongest and whitest fiber for pulp and paper came from black spruce, a species regarded by pine-loving timbermen as little better than a weed. Pulp and paper mills not only required huge volumes of fiber and hydroelectric power, but also were capital-intensive ventures that required farsighted business strategies and funds raised on skeptical markets. The best means of managing production and reassuring creditors would be to secure exclusive concessions of large tracts of spruce-rich woodlands and hydroelectric facilities for periods of many decades; these assets could then be used as collateral in raising capital.

But the Crown managed timber lands very differently from arable lands. It granted farmers absolute ownership of agricultural soil, but allocated to lumbermen mere licenses to cut a specified quantity of timber in woodlands over which the Crown retained ownership. Provincial officials proved unwilling to grant newsprint makers new rights, privileges, and resources. They imposed restrictions on the size, location, and quantities of trees to be harvested. They insisted that mills be erected and operated according to conditions that proved disastrous to businessmen, demanding guarantee bonds, high production and employment capacities, remote locations, rapid schedules, or work-sharing agreements with rival producers. Also, they forbade concessionaires from transferring their rights to any other party until such obligations had been met, and revoked them for the least infraction, rendering them worthless as collateral. With seeming perversity, officials also allowed correspondence from industrialists to lie unanswered for months at a time and often tendered leases to bidders with wholly fabricated estimates of their pulpwood supplies. As a result, although the newsprint industry did grow (thanks to increasing demand in the United States), it remained on a perilously unstable footing.

Pulp and paper industrialists did manage to forge strong relationships with the small cadre of professional civil servants whose long study of the timber sector could have become the basis of coherent development policy. But critical decision making remained in the hands of elected officials, who were motivated by other concerns. Traditional lumbermen and pulpwood exporters had much to lose if absolute, long-term rights were ceded to the mills. And these interests enjoyed longer and closer ties to the state: dozens of officeholders listed “lumbering” as their occupation. Pulpwood concessionaires were therefore forbidden to harvest in any location where lumbering pine also grew and forced to engage in competitive public bidding for leases, while lumbermen were not.

In addition, the primary goal of provincial administrations had long been to populate the hinterlands of northern Ontario. Selling spruce from cleared farmland to exporters and to the mills was the best guarantor of income for homesteaders in regions that posed climatological challenges for farming. Pulpwood tracts had to remain open to farming settlers and mining prospectors as well as traditional lumbermen, and hydroelectric power generated by the mills was often reserved for settlers even at the expense of the needs of manufacturing.

As politicians jockeyed for votes, they often denounced opponents for cozying up to industry, creating imperatives to play hardball with manufacturers. Finally, as the sector matured, larger U.S. newsprint makers proved better able to establish relationships with Ontario officials than smaller-scale domestic entrepreneurs. Above all, politicians were determined to maintain the patronage system for allocating Crown resources. No matter which party was in power—the Liberals, the Conservatives, or the United Farmers—the concession of timber rights remained a function of the interests of political personalities and machineries rather than the needs of industry; statesmen “preferred to dole out the trees and water power in a manner that redounded, first and foremost, to the benefit of their political parties and consorts” (p. 298).

Beyond its specific challenge to the Nelles thesis, Kuhlberg's research may offer a thought-provoking test of the broader principles of staples theory—a model, based largely on the Canadian experience, that suggests that the mode of extraction of a region's principle natural resource will determine its political development. Kuhlberg demonstrates that a single resource—spruce timber—could be extracted by a variety of methods (wholesale by timbermen, independently by settlers, or industrially by pulp men), to serve a variety of socioeconomic interests (export, conversion to arable land, or raw material for domestic manufacturing)—choices that lay with concession-granting statesmen. In this instance, resource extraction did not shape the political system; rather, the political needs of gatekeeping officials determined the facility with which different types of extractors would develop different sectors of the economy.