Robert C.H. Sweeny

Robert C.H. Sweeny, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?  Montreal, 1819-1849.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
In Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?, Robert Sweeny offers an erudite yet also passionate argument for the re-thinking of Canadian history. In this provocative book, Sweeny answers the question Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?, engaging with historians who have examined the history of Montréal, but also tracing the evolution of his own thought over the last decades. Historians, Sweeny argues, do not live outside history but are part of it, and so must contextualize and understand how their own views of the past reflect on the sources they use and the questions they ask. His questioning and contextualising of the sources reveals the changing creative process of an historian who has revisited, questioned and revised his own findings as a result of new ways of thinking which have emerged among intellectuals over the past forty years. According to him, the answer to his book’s question (without revealing the punchline) lies in the exploitation of unfree labour for the production of commodities, together with the emergence of liberalism and its valuation of property. Sweeny’s work belongs to economic history, historical geography, and historiography. It is the work of a politically committed historian who recognises the political and ethical nature of historical debates. For historians who think seriously about what we do and how we do what we do, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? is a model of intellectual engagement, one that offers valuable reflections on the meaning of Canadian history and how it should be pursued from this point forward.

Shortlisted Books
Caroline Durand, Nourrir la machine humaine.  Nutrition et alimentation au Québec, 1860-1945.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
Craig Heron,  Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remaking the Workers’ City.  Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015.
Michel Hogue,  Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People.  Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015.
Douglas McCalla, Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.