Robert Sweeny, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize: Montreal, 1819–1849. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. 456 pp.

At first glance, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize is a book about Montreal and Lower Canada’s transformation from an ancien regime society to an industrial, liberal and capitalist society. Robert Sweeny examines the relationship between town and country, the processes of social change and the tension between advocates of a moral economy of a liberal economy. On the merits of this alone, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize makes an important contribution to the historiography of urbanization in Early Canada and, more broadly speaking, of the transition to capitalism. There is, however, a second and equally important layer to this work. Why Did We Choose to Industrialize is a compelling testament to meticulous archival research and active history. It is a book about an historian’s career, about a craft and a vocation. Sweeny writes eloquently about moments over the course of his career when a close reading of a body of archival documents- often notarial records- awarded him a fresh perspective on the processes of social and economic change in Montreal and, to a lesser degree, Newfoundland. He leads us from his earliest works as a founding member of the Montreal Business History Project- a collective undertaking by a group of politically engaged social historians working in the late 1970s- to the periodic re-thinking of his approach to the historian’s craft spurred on by the cultural turn, the emergence of gender history, post-colonial theory and technological developments in the field of digital mapping. This act of piecing together an interpretation of the past through archival documents is one that Sweeny urges historians to engage in with a critical eye. Throughout Why Did We Choose to Industrialize, he outlines a variety of moments when re-thinking historical sources- grappling with how they were produced and what their authors aimed to do by producing them- led him towards new perspectives on the processes of historical change. Sweeny credits this approach to archival work with allowing him the opportunity to complicate some of the conventional assumptions around the narrative of the transition in colonial cities. Amidst a historiography shaped by sweeping assumptions about the transition, Sweeny demonstrates how notarial records provided fresh insights into the relationships between banks, artisans and merchants that demonstrated the weaknesses in the Staples Thesis. Years spent working on digital mapping, meanwhile, prompted Sweeny to challenge the notion that industrialization and the transition to capitalism created an urban landscape marked by social segregation. The complexity of the trail of archival sources uncovered by Sweeny suggests that there is much work left for historians to undertake examining how these processes unfolded at the local level, rather than just accepting broad generalizations at face value. Sweeny pushes the reader to take into consideration the epistemology of the documents they rely upon, and how they reflect an unjust society. Particularly noteworthy here is his critical assessment of censuses, street maps and city directories of Montreal published in the 1820s and 1830s. While these documents, Sweeny argues, might tell us a great deal about the city’s composition at a transformative moment, they were inextricably shaped by the assumptions and aspirations of their creators. In the face of rapid social change and relationships that were being renegotiated on the fly, the producers of these sources were finding ways to accentuate the order and modernity of their surroundings. Taken at face value, these documents can sometimes push historians towards assumptions that Montreal’s transition to a capitalist society shaped by liberal assumptions about property occurred much more tidily than it did. There is a richer vein, Sweeny argues, that can be tapped by digging deeper …