Fortune favored me not when I agreed to review this two-volume history of Canada's oldest bank, the Bank of Montreal (BoM). Only worth the slog is the second volume, subtitled Territories of Transformation, which covers the postwar period much more thoroughly and insightfully than the other two-volume history of BoM, Merrill Denison's Canada's First Bank (1966–67). As the coauthor of three massive corporate histories, however, I appreciate the difficulty of undertaking a project of this magnitude and complexity.

Authors can engage readers more if they proceed chronologically, but then they subvert major themes. If they organize material thematically, they must bounce around chronologically, which can confuse readers. Laurence B. Mussio tried to minimize that classic tradeoff by providing short contextual “introductions” for all six of the work's largely chronological multi-chapter “parts,” plus a “general introduction” that also introduces the one-chapter part 1, “In the Beginning, 1760–1817.” Much repetition and a textbook-like table of contents inevitably follow. The problem might have been better tackled by providing a narrative overview followed by thematic chapters on each part of the bank's business, including asset and liability management, branch expansion and acquisitions, and so forth, but Mussio may have eschewed that framework because he does not possess sufficient technical understanding of banking to pull it off.

Clearly, Mussio favors BoM's Machiavellian political machinations (pp. 1:103–4), especially its rent-seeking behaviors in Ottawa (and earlier capitals before 1867), over detailed analysis of its business operations. He even contextualizes its credit-rating system by referencing James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999) rather than, say, the work of Rowena Olegario. Most of the rare discussions of banking practices display limited understanding and/or imprecise writing. I do not think that one must be an economic and financial historian to write a corporate history of a bank, but it surely helps.

For example, Mussio claims that “currency and exchange were far from settled entities and concepts. Paper currency was new, untested,” centuries after bills of exchange and over a century after bills of credit had been introduced to British North America (p. 1:30). Though “banking” is not an “instrument,” he asserts that “banking itself was a young and unproven new financial instrument,” yet joint-stock banks had operated in the United States since the 1780s and proven themselves quite capable (pp. 1:44–45). Where he writes that the bank “set down strict rules for bills-of-exchange discounts” he must have meant “discounting bills of exchange” but more importantly he does not summarize, much less assess, the rules (p. 1:34). A redundancy suggests that he does not quite understand the monetary system of the early era: “The circulation of coin, currency, and specie was a major preoccupation for the bank, since it involved a high degree of risk” (p. 1:46). Worse, how assets like full-bodied gold and silver coins (i.e., specie) posed risks to the bank is left unexplained, as is the claim that “Routh argued that the adoption of the British sterling as the official medium of exchange in Lower Canada would end the confusion surrounding the variety of foreign currencies in use in the colony” (pp. 1:62–63). Sterling was a unit of account, use of which was in no way incompatible with the circulation of foreign coins or U.S. banknotes as media of exchange.

Rhetorical flourish might explain some gaffes but the book is by no means a narrative. It employs no storytelling techniques, so I cannot fathom how CEO Darryl White could claim that Mussio's “storytelling skills are superb” (p. 1:xii). A storyteller would have begun the book, or at least a chapter, with a dramatic scene—as when a French writer beseeched his countrymen to rid themselves of BoM notes “as soon as possible” and to “take no more” of them (pp. 1:36–37)—and then backtracked to explain what led to the 1834 call to run on the bank and how the reputation of the bank's directors, combined with its conservative balance sheet and status as the government's fiscal agent, saved it. Similarly, a storyteller would have developed a single narrative around the use of BoM branches as social clubs during the Great War, a fascinating development that Mussio fragments over three separate chapters. In short, the text is decidedly didactic, with Mussio serving as lecturer rather than muse. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach in a scholarly tome, but inducing readers to expect five-hundred-plus pages of ripping yarns when only analysis follows is lamentable.

Mussio's grasp of economics also appears loose in places, as when he claims that in the late nineteenth century “Western Europe and North America suffered from industrial overproduction . . . and experienced a prolonged period of general international stagnation” (p. 1:109). Many macroeconomists would call the first claim impossible and international economists would wonder what the second claim could possibly mean during an era of intense globalization. Failure to put time series data on a log scale, as in Figure 6.1, visually reinforces the dubious narrative. In other places, Mussio seems simply to repeat old canards from secondary sources, some of dubious merit. Like too many other authors, for example, he sometimes uses the term “capital” in allegorical ways, as when he informs readers that “Canadian capital in this period was just beginning to show signs of life in the 1820s and 1830s” (p. 1:47).

Nevertheless, the book contains valuable insights well put, like Mussio's description of BoM's original articles of association from May 1817: “The provisions are in reality the foundations of a bank system that can be said to be American in design, continental in scope, and British in character” (p. 1:17). Also pithy and accurate is his claim that “the first generation's mission can be crystallized as one dedicated to building a solid foundation for bank performance and strategy based on three elements: reputations, relationships, and networks” (p. 1:20).

Another contribution is Mussio's explanation for Canada's much-admired ability to withstand global financial shocks, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. His story is essentially one of path dependence. By the 1860s, he writes, “the fundamental character, tenor, and approach of Canadian banking had been, through a generation, bred in the bone” (p. 1:80). Policymakers tried American-style free banking but quickly rejected it as too risky for the Queen's tastes. Thereafter, Canada played the tortoise to America's hare, which meant protecting the rents of its banks through cartelization. In exchange for steady profits, BoM and other large Canadian banks purchased smaller institutions when they toppled. All that has been pointed out before, but never in such detail. Analysis of BoM's multifaceted response to the Depression, including its roles in the bailout of Newfoundland (then a separate dominion) and the 1935 establishment of Canada's central bank, the Bank of Canada, stands as the high point of volume 1, subtitled A Dominion of Capital.

Batches of biographical snippets of numerous bank leaders render parts of the book prosopographical. Overall, they reinforce the notion that for its first century or so BoM's leadership was not only largely Scots-Irish but interrelated by blood and marriage. The potential social and economic significance of their close ties, though, remains muted. Moreover, stockholders rarely merit mention and do not even make the consolidated index at the end of volume 2, which escapes the shadow of earlier work and truly enlightens readers on BoM's more recent history and its transformation into the financial holding company BMO.

The story is complex, with as many failures (like a female-only branch with a $2,000 minimum balance) as successes (like ending the mandate that employees obtain permission to marry). The key appears to have been incentives to place safety above profits. While managers reacted to falling relative return on equity (ROE) and asset ranking, they experimented at the margins rather than betting the bank. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, BoM hired McKinsey and Company to help with domestic and international branch expansion, training, and automation. Despite such reforms, BoM continued to suffer from a low stock price. According to Mussio, William David Mulholland Jr. served as the bank's “saviour general.” Among other moves, Mulholland spearheaded acquisition of Harris Bank of Chicago in 1984 and helped to make BoM the employer of choice for leading women bankers like Betsy Wright. He also increased employee and depositor retention across the bank, from sea to sea and the Arctic to Chicagoland.

Although Mussio could not base them on archival sources for legal and policy reasons, the final two chapters are perhaps the volume's best in terms of readability and insight. In 1990, four “Regenerators” picked up Mulholland's mandate, putting the bank in position to merge with the Royal Bank of Canada in 1998. After regulators scuttled the deal, BoM redoubled its acquisition efforts in the United States, which proved profitable, and abroad, but only in China did it find fertile ground. In 2017, the bank remained financially strong and celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary with the publication of Mussio's heavily illustrated history of the bank, A Vision Greater Than Themselves.