Laurentian Thesis

Background

Historian Donald Creighton is most closely associated with the Laurentian thesis. He discussed it in his best-known work, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850 (1937). The concept is based on the staple thesis. It was developed by Creighton’s close friend, political economist Harold Innis. In his The Fur Trade in Canada (1930), Innis argued that Canada’s development was marked by the exploitation of staple resources — fur, timber, wheat, etc. — that were exported to more advanced economies. This led to the traditional view of Canadians as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Innis also argued that Canada’s evolution was shaped by the specific resources that were exploited at any given time.

Innis had developed the staple thesis with W.A. Mackintosh in the 1920s. However, the two differed in their conclusions about where this would take Canada. Mackintosh believed that Canada would eventually develop a mature industrial economy of its own based on resource extraction. But Innis feared that Canada risked being economically dependent on larger economies and therefore subordinate to them. This debate reflected the tension in Canada’s development in the years between Confederation and the Second World War: the country expanded east to west as a resource colony of the United Kingdom while also integrating north to south in both industry and commerce with the United States.

Related Concepts

The Laurentian thesis challenged two other dominant ideas that had been used since the late 19th century to explain North America’s development. One was American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier thesis. It argued that the availability of unsettled land (i.e., the frontier) led to the rapid growth and development of the United States. The other was continentalism. This is the idea that Canada and the US are destined to greater north-south integration as neighbours on the North American continent. The concept of Manifest Destiny — the American belief that the United States would inevitably occupy all of North America — grew out of continentalist thinking.

Metropolitan-Hinterland Thesis

The Metropolitan-Hinterland thesis is a related and similar concept to the Laurentian thesis. It was developed by Canadian economic historian and Harvard business professor N.S.B. Gras in the 1920s. It describes historic relations between cities and outlying regions as being characterized by an exploitive power imbalance that favours the larger centres.

In the Laurentian thesis, the major centres around the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes — Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa and Toronto — are the “metropolises” (the “empire of the St. Lawrence,” in Creighton’s words).

Criticism

An important criticism of the Laurentian thesis is that it ignores Indigenous peoples’ habitation of North America for tens of thousands of years. Indigenous peoples had developed their own economic and political relations, intricate systems of government and trade, and networks of transportation and communication. All of this predated European arrival. As such, it played an important though often overlooked role in influencing colonial development in North America. (See also New France; British North America.)

W.L. Morton was a critic of the Laurentian thesis. In a 1946 address called “Clio in Canada: The Interpretation of Canadian History” (published in University of Toronto Quarterly), Morton warned of Canada’s potential for cultural and regional exploitation. This perspective gave rise to related concepts, such as dependency theory and the idea that sectors of the Canadian economy would benefit from being “branch plants” of the US market. (This attitude was widespread in the Canadian film industry in the first half of the 20th century. It is the reason Canada has been part of the domestic US market for movie theatres since the 1920s.)

J.M.S. Careless’s publication, Canada: A Story of Challenge (1953), also built upon Morton’s approach. Careless, however, paid closer attention to regional differentiation and the Metropolitan-Hinterland thesis. From this perspective, one can see the seeds of Western alienation in Canada, with many in the Prairie provinces feeling that they are exploited for the benefit of “Laurentian elites.”

(See also Staple Thesis; Metropolitan-Hinterland thesis; Frontier Thesis; Commodities in Canada; Resource Towns in Canada.)