The Cape Breton Coal Industry and the Rise and Fall of the British Empire Steel Corporation

Our understanding of regional underdevelopment in Atlantic Canada has been slow to develop. For more than 50 years we have had extensive documentation of the existence of serious regional inequality in Canada. Attempts to explain the reasons for this have been less common. In the 1920s politicians active in the Maritime Rights movement catalogued the "unfilled promises" and "betrayals" of Confederation and demanded increased federal subsidies as compensation. A less subjective interpretation was proposed by S. A. Saunders, C. R. Fay and Harold Innis, who attributed the region's troubles to the new era of industrialism. For the Maritimes it was "prosperity so long as their face was towards the sea, and . . . struggle against adversity when the pull of the land increased". Like an "economic seismograph", the Maritimes registered the Shockwaves of a "rising tide of continental forces that were destined to dominate the economy of the Maritime Provinces". Recent studies have questioned this approach: an economic historian has challenged the myth of the "Golden Age"; an historical geographer has traced the domination of the region by outside forces during the colonial era; an economist has pointed out that during a decisive period in the 1830s and 1840s local entrepreneurs neglected the region's industrial potential.