Re-developing Underdevelopment: An Agenda for New Histories of Capitalism in the Maritimes

Abstract

THINKING AND WRITING ABOUT MARITIME HISTORY has always been intensely personal for me.1 Although I have made my adult life in a different province, (largely) in a different language, and do my main academic work on an unrelated topic, there remains an integral part of me conditioned by having grown up in Upper Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia. Much of this, I suppose, is similar to what any of us feels when we look back: a childhood home lost, formative relationships broken up, old friends now gone. As bell hooks has written, “We are born and have our being in a place of memory.”2 But another part is a result of having experienced my early political awakenings in a household steeped in the radical regionalism of the 1980s, my central analyses shaped by that New Maritimes3 generation that adapted core-periphery frameworks to the regional context while denouncing the exploitation of the transient, Maritime “light infantry of capital.”4 This formulation, and therefore mine, was all about “our people,” “our culture,” and our “colonization” by Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, Toronto, and, later, the multinational corporations of the Alberta tar sands.5