Amassing Power

At the turn of the century American industrialist J.B. Duke set his sights on one of North America's greatest and most spectacular rivers - the Saguenay. In Amassing Power David Massell chronicles thirty years of international intrigue as Duke manoeuvred to gain access to, develop, and sell the tremendous hydro-electric potential of a remote river in Quebec. The damming of the Saguenay brought industrialisation on a grand scale to rural Quebec in the form of newsprint and aluminum manufacture. Tapping into rich and diverse sources in Canada, the United States, and Europe, Massell provides an interdisciplinary, cross-border study of American capital and Canadian resources. He shows us how ever-larger amounts of capital yielded increasingly massive and sophisticated applications of hydroelectric technology. Grand industrial plans, in turn, encroached upon provincial water rights and farmers' lands, which drew the attention of the state. He examines the protracted power struggle between public and private interests - between American capitalists and the nascent bureaucracy of the province of Quebec - and describes the origins and evolution of the events that led to state control over hydraulic resources in the province. In doing so he provides vivid portraits of Duke and of Quebec politicians of the period and gives a dramatic account of the protracted battle of wits between Duke's chief engineer, William States Lee, and Quebec's chief of Hydraulic Service, Arthur Amos. Amassing Power speaks to the integration of North American economies, vividly illustrating the process by which American capital drew Canada's resource-rich North into the economic orbit of the United States.