This paper is an attempt to describe the character of business enterprise in
nineteenth century Vancouver by examining real estate businessmen during the city's first
boom from 1884-1893. Throughout the 1880s the area could still be described as a
'frontier' environment where rapid growth, general uncertainty, and fluid economic and
social boundaries meant that the people who took an active role in a city's founding were
crucial in determining the city's business culture.
What makes Vancouver's situation intriguing was the fact that businessmen
representing a hierarchy of salaried corporate executives, specifically the managers of the
Canadian Pacific Railway, and businessmen representing a very individualistic approach
to enterprise, converged on the south shore of Burrard Inlet at the same time. While not
unique to Vancouver, these two conceptions of business, active on a large scale at
approximately the same time, created a commercial identity and environment particular to
Vancouver. Using Alfred Chandler's four stage model on the changing relationship of
business and entrepreneurship to society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this
paper proposes to show that, instead of following an evolutionary process of ever
increasing business size and complexity through time, Vancouver's real estate industry
and general business community retained the characteristics of independent personal
enterprise to a greater degree than the dominant position of the CPR would suggest.
Even when attempts were made to establish institutions of self-interested
collectivism or move toward a style of entrepreneurial capitalism, they were all effectively
applied to the advantage of the individual. The voluntary and membership organizations
such as the Vancouver Real Estate Board, and the Vancouver Board of Trade, the new
business syndicates like the Vancouver Improvement Company and the Vancouver Loan,
Trust, Savings, and Guarantee Company, and the decisions to enter the municipal,
provincial, and federal political arenas were still dominated by an individualist creed.
Until the maturation of the staple based industries enabled other enterprises to adopt
managerial capitalism, the philosophy of the business community would remain heavily
influenced by a personal enterprise form of business operation. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/4311 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Longhurst, Grant Montgomery |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 3383134 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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