The city below the hill is a detailed investigation of social conditions in a working class quarter of Montreal during the 1890s. Based on a house-to-house survey of the neighbourhood, this study catalogues and analyses the life of working people after the first years of rapid industrialization.Sir Herbert Brown Ames was one of the first to recognize that urbanization was inevitable and to set about improving the quality of city life. In this study, first published in book...

Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production is Marx's monumental critique of political economy and the first volume of his analysis of capitalism's inner laws. Moving from the commodity and money to surplus value, machinery, accumulation, and primitive accumulation, the book combines rigorous economic argument, historical inquiry, philosophical dialectic, and biting literary satire. Written against classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo, it transforms political economy into a cri...

The first full-scale biography of Canada’s first prime minister in half a century by one of our best-known and most highly regarded political writers.The first volume of Richard Gwyn’s definitive biography of John A. Macdonald follows his life from his birth in Scotland in 1815 to his emigration with his family to Kingston, Ontario, to his days as a young, rising lawyer, to his tragedy-ridden first marriage, to the birth of his political ambitions, to his commitment to the all-but-...

Canada has no better interpreter than prolific writer and thinker John Ralston Saul. Here he argues that Canada did not begin in 1867; indeed, its foundation was laid by two visionary men, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin. The two leaders of Lower and Upper Canada, respectively, worked together after the 1841 Union to lead a reformist movement for responsible government run by elected citizens instead of a colonial governor.But it was during the "Great Ministry" of 184...

In a country this diverse, 'culture' has different meanings. Vance tells a story from the wind-swept Arctic where a stranded Innu woman, fighting to survive, took the time to decorate her clothing with rich designs. A British explorer was amazed at her efforts, but Vance reminds us of the inseparable connection between life and art in Inuit culture (the Innu word for 'breathe' also means 'to make poetry,' and both derive from the word for 'the soul'). No surprise that Aboriginal culture began...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867-1883) by Karl Marx is a foundational theoretical text in communist philosophy, economics and politics. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production, in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill.

This is a book about freedom – and the lack of it – in Canada: freedom from useless and often degrading toil, freedom from want and freedom from ignorance. It is Pierre Berton’s thesis, documented by public statements made over the past generation, that a smug minority of business and political leaders has conspired to inhibit that freedom. The establishment, says Berton, has brainwashed the public into believing a series of myths which have no validity in a post-Puritan age. These myths i...

The #1 New York Times–bestselling political humorist reads Adam Smith's classic economic treatise—so you don't have to.Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long. The original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes—including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page "Digression concerning the Variations in the Value of Silver during th...

The subject of these lectures is the Industrial and Agrarian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Including chapters on England in 1760, the mercantile system and Adam Smith, the growth of pauperism and the future of the working classes. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quali...

Molson. Redpath. Desjardins. Labatt. Massey. Eaton. These names are as much a part of our national identity as our hockey teams and our literature, but few of us know much about the people behind them - the individuals who have energized this country's economic life for over four centuries, and whose entrepreneurialism has shaped the face of Canadian business as we know it.This captivating collection of biographies profiles Canada's most prominent and innovative business people fro...

George Brown (1818-1880) was the influential editor of the Toronto Globe, the most powerful newspaper in British North America. He was also leader of the Liberal Party, arch-rival of John A. Macdonald, and the statesman who held the key to Confederation at its most critical stage. This second volume traces the sectional conflict that brought political deadlock by 1864 and makes clear Brown’s vital function in finding a way out. It also sets out in meticulous detail his career afte...

New forces, new cravings, new aims, which had been silently gathering beneath the crust of reaction, burst suddenly into view.'—J. R. GREEN, Short History of the English People, Chap. x. 'Change is consummated in many cases after much argument and agitation, and men do not observe that almost everything has been silently effected by causes to which few people paid any heed. In one generation an institution is unassailable, in the next bold men may assail it, and in the third bold men defen...