Is it possible that generations of Canadian economists and historians have got it wrong and Canadian manufacturing before WWI was fairly efficient? Yes, because they do not pay enough attention to the measurement of efficiency. New cliometric evidence supporting the revisionist side of this...

I argue that the 19th century Canadian cotton textile industry was an extremely successful infant industry. Judging the industry’s performance by seven widely-employed measures of success – growth in output, contemporary opinion, size, the use of the most modern machinery, exports, and...