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Manufacturing Montreal: the Making of an Industrial Landscape.

Article Excerpt
by Robert Lewis, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 2000, xvii + 336 pp. cloth US$45.00 (ISBN 0-8018-6349-X)

Robert Lewis has written an important book. Manufacturing Montreal will serve as a benchmark for any subsequent discussion of the changing manufacturing geography of the Canadian city during the country's Great Transformation, c.1850-1930. In presenting his argument, for the most part persuasively argued, Lewis offers extensive research materials, carefully outlined methodologies, fluid writing, and well-placed illustrations. In short, it is an impressive study.

Framing the study is Lewis' quarrel with the many scholars, not just in Canada, who claim that the flight of manufacturing to North America's suburbs is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. The conventional wisdom goes something like this: manufacturing decentralization did not occur until after the First World War. As some explain, only then did land in the downtown become scarce, vertical factories turn obsolete, and trucks slow on congested city streets.

Lewis challenges...

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