¹ The classic British and American studies include Habakkuk, H. J., American and British Technology in the 19th Century (Cambridge, England, 1962)Google Scholar; (in response to the Habakkuk debate) David, Paul A., Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Nathan, “Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry, 1840–1910,” Journal of Economic History 23 (1963): 414–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, Louis C., A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 1: Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville, Va., 1979)Google Scholar. Studies on the subject of technological lag in Canada, mostly in the form of articles, include Faucher, Albert, “The Decline of Shipbuilding at Quebec in the Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 23, 2 (1957): 195–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harley, C. K., “On the Persistence of Old Techniques: The Case of North American Wooden Shipbuilding,” Journal of Economic History 33 (1972): 372–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pomfret, Richard, “Mechanization of Reaping in Nineteenth-Century Ontario: A Case Study of the Pace and Causes of the Diffusion of Embodied Technical Change,” Journal of Economic History 36 (1976): 399–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newell, Dianne, Technology on the Frontier: Mining in Old Ontario (Vancouver, B.C., 1986)Google Scholar.

² See Gregory, Homer E. and Barnes, Kathleen, North Pacific Fisheries, with special reference to Alaska Salmon (San Francisco, Calif., 1937)Google Scholar; Cobb, John N., Pacific Salmon Fisheries, 4th ed., U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Fisheries, Fisheries Doc. no. 1092 (Washington, D.C., 1930), 409–704Google Scholar; Lyons, Cicely, Salmon: Our Heritage (Vancouver, B.C., 1969)Google Scholar; Marchak, Patricia, Guppy, Neil, and McMullan, John, eds., Uncommon Property: The Fishing and Fish-Processing Industries in British Columbia (Toronto, 1987)Google Scholar; Carrothers, W. A., The British Columbia Fisheries (Toronto, 1941)Google Scholar.

³ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 134–37; Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 391–402Google Scholar.

⁴ Urquhart, M. C., ed., Historical Statistics of Canada (Toronto, 1965), 287–407Google Scholar; Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics [hereafter DBS], Fisheries Branch, Fisheries Statistics of Canada, 1917 to 1945 (Ottawa, 1918Google Scholar to 1946), “Capital Invested” table. Canada's next most valuable fish resource was Atlantic lobster (occasionally outpaced by Pacific halibut). Salmon canning started up in Japan and Siberia during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5.

⁵ Standard works on canning are Judge, Arthur I., ed., A History of the Canning Industry by its most Prominent Men (Baltimore, Md., 1914)Google Scholar; Bitting, Arvill W., Appertizing or the Art of Canning: Its History and Development (San Francisco, Calif., 1937Google Scholar); Keuchel, Edward F. Jr., “The Development of the Canning Industry in New York State to 1960” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1970)Google Scholar. Recent studies include Brown, Martin and Philips, Peter, “Craft Labor and Mechanization in Nineteenth-Century American Canning,” Journal of Economic History 46 (Sept. 1986): 743–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, and Philips, , “The Decline of the Piece-Rate System in California Canning: Technological Innovation, Labor Management, and Union Pressure, 1890–1947,” Business History Review 60 (Winter 1986): 564–601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ruiz, Vicki, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1987)Google Scholar. For salmon canning see O'Bannon, Patrick W., “Technological Change in the Pacific Coast Canned Salmon Industry, 1900–1925: A Case Study,” Agricultural History 56 (Jan. 1982): 151–66Google Scholar; O'Bannon, , “Waves of Change: Mechanization in the Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1864–1924,” Technology and Culture 28 (July 1987): 558–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stacey, Duncan A., Sockeye and Tinplate: Technological Change in the Fraser River Canning Industry, 1871–1912, Heritage Record No. 15 (Victoría, B.C., 1982)Google Scholar.

⁶ O'Bannon, “Waves of Change,” 563; O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1900–1925,” 166.

⁷ Alicja Muszynski, “Major Processors to 1940 and Early Labour Force: Historical Notes,” in Marchak, Guppy, and McMullan, Uncommon Property, 60.

⁸ Muszynski, Alieja, “The Organization of Women and Ethnic Minorities in a Resource Industry: A Case Study of the Unionization of Shoreworkers in the B.C. Fishing Industry, 1937–1982,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes 19 (Jan. 1984): 89–107Google Scholar.

⁹ Marr, William and Paterson, Donald G., Canada: An Economic History (Toronto, 1980), 34Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Stacey, Sockeye and Tinplate, 22–24; McKervill, Hugh W., The Salmon People: The Story of Canada's West Coast Salmon Fishing Industry (Sidney, B.C., 1967), 74Google Scholar; Reid, David J., “Company Mergers in the Fraser River Salmon Canning Industry, 1885–1902,” Canadian Historical Review 56 (Sept. 1976): 282–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, , The Development of the Fraser River Salmon Canning Industry, 1885–1913 (Ottawa, 1973)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Chandler, The Visible Hand, 289.

¹² Ibid., 290.

¹³ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 106.

¹⁴ Sockeyes (Oncorhyncus nerka, also called “Alaska red” and “bluebaek” in parts of the United States) and pinks averaged 10 to 15 pounds. A chum (keta) salmon was on average double, and a spring (Chinook or king) salmon triple, that weight.

¹⁵ Newell, Dianne, “Dispersal and Concentration: The Slowly Changing Spatial Pattern of the British Columbia Salmon Canning Industry,” Journal of Historical Geography 14 (Jan. 1988): 22–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ “How Salmon Is Canned,” Pacific Fishermen Yearbook, Supplement (Jan. 1936).

¹⁷ Brown and Philips, “Decline of the Piece-Rate System in California Canning,” 582.

¹⁸ Newell, “Dispersal and Concentration,” 25–26.

¹⁹ Newell, Dianne, “Surveying Historic Industrial Tidewater Sites: The Case of the B.C. Salmon Canning Industry,” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 13 (Spring 1987): 1–16Google Scholar.

²⁰ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 42–43, fig. 3.

²¹ Newell, “Dispersal and Concentration,” 26–29. To my knowledge no complete count exists for the American salmon cannery sites, though see Guimary, Donald L., Salmon Canneries in Southeast Alaska: A Documentation of Selected Historic Canneries and Cannery Sites, Report for the Office of History and Archeology, Alaska Division of Parks (Anchorage, Nov. 1983)Google Scholar.

²² See Henry Doyle Papers, box 6, file 1, “Comparison of Approximate Plant Investment and Pack of B. C. Fishing & Packing Co. Ltd. [formerly British Columbia Packers Association, eventually renamed British Columbia Packers, Ltd.), Wallace Fisheries Ltd., and Canadian Fishing Co.” (c. 1924–25), University of British Columbia Library.

²³ The postwar change is documented for British Columbia by John McMullan, “State, Capital, and the B.C. Salmon-Fishing Industry,” in Marchak, Guppy, and McMullan, Uncommon Property, 107–52.

²⁴ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 95, 96 (table 4), 107 (table 6).

²⁵ The following is taken from Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 103–5, 176–77 (table 8).

²⁶ Newell, Dianne, ed., The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry: A Grown Man's Game (forthcoming, Montreal, 1989)Google Scholar, table A9 (appendix).

²⁷ Hume, R. D., “The First Salmon Cannery,” Pacific Fisherman Annual Edition 2 (Jan. 1904)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), 77–83Google Scholar. O'Bannon provides a helpful discussion of the origins of the division of labor in salmon canneries in “Technological Change in the Pacific Coast Canned Salmon Industry, 1864–1924” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1983), 41–42, 223–28Google Scholar.

²⁹ “Description of an Unnamed Salmon Cannery at New Westminster,” Mainland Guardian, 14 April 1877.

³⁰ The contract labor system was widely used in nineteenth-century China in industries requiring large gangs, such as mining and agriculture. Cloud, Patricia and Galenson, David W., “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Explorations in Economic History 24 (Jan. 1987): 22–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yuzo Murayama, “Contractors, Collusion, and Competition: Japanese Immigrant Railroad Laborers in the Pacific Northwest, 1898–1911,” ibid. 21 (July 1984): 290–305.

³¹ See Lauren Casaday's massive study of labor contracting, “Labor Unrest and the Labor Movement in the Salmon Industry of the Pacific Northwest” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1937)Google Scholar; Masson, Jack and Guimary, Donald, “Asian Labor Contractors in the Alaskan Canned Salmon Industry: 1880–1937,” Labor History 22 (Summer 1981): 377–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Besides Casaday, “Labor Unrest,” see Nash, Robert A., “The ‘China Gangs’ in the Alaska Packers Association Canneries.1892–1935,” in The Life, Influence and the Role of the Chinese in the United States, 1776–1960: Proceedings/Papers of the National Conference held at the University of San Francisco, July 10–12, 1975 (San Francisco, Calif., 1976)Google Scholar, cited in Masson and Guimary, “Asian Labor Contractors,” 382.

³³ The discussion on contracting that follows is taken from Masson and Guimary, “Asian Labor Contractors,” and Newell, The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry, chap. 2.

³⁴ Doyle Papers, box 4, notebook 19, “Chinese Contracts [with B.C. Packers Association] for 1904 and 1905”; notebook 21, “Executive Notes, H.D., 4 August 1904.”

³⁵ Masson and Guimary, “Asian Labor Contractors,” 378, 384.

³⁶ Although DBS reported detailed information on labor for other branches of the Canadian fishery, owing to the contracting system employed in salmon canning, for piece-workers and contract labor no details of employment are available other than number so employed and sums paid each year, beginning in 1918.

³⁷ Masson and Guimary, “Asian Labor Contractors,” 396–97; author's private communication with Gladys Blyth, Port Edward, B.C., 10 May 1988.

³⁸ But see Knight, Rolf, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Indian Labour in British Columbia, 1858–1930 (Vancouver, B.C., 1978), 78–100Google Scholar; Newell, Dianne, “The Intermeshing of the Industrial Economy with the Native Economy in Coastal B.C.,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, Chicago, 2–5 November 1988Google Scholar; Muszynski, Alieja, “The Creation and Organization of Cheap Wage Labour in the B.C. Fishing Industry” (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1986)Google Scholar; Boxberger, Daniel L., “Lummi Indians and the Commercial Salmon Fishery of North Puget Sound, 1880–1900,” Ethnohistory 35, 2 (1988): 169–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term “Native” is used today to refer to aboriginal peoples and their offspring regardless of their official status.

³⁹ See Rathburn, Richard, “A Review of the Fisheries in the Contiguous Waters of the State of Washington and British Columbia,” in Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries for 1899 (Washington, D.C., 1900), 253–350Google Scholar; Roundsfell, George A. and Kelez, George B., The Salmon and Salmon Fisheries of Swiftsure Bank, Puget Sound, and the Fraser River, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, no. 49 (Washington, D.C., 1938)Google Scholar; Smith, Courtland L., Salmon Fishers of the Columbia (Corvallis, Ore., 1979)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Masson and Guimary, “Asian Labor Contractors,” 376.

⁴¹ Casaday, “Labor Unrest,” 82, table 11. Although Natives (“Indians and Eskimos”) remained steady as a percentage of the shoreworkers, their absolute number did not; it grew from a low of 1,033 in 1908 to a peak of 2,542 in 1917, dipped during the postwar depression, then rose to 2,836 in 1934.

⁴² Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, chap. 12.

⁴³ DBS, Fisheries Statistics, 1918 to 1940, II: “Agencies of Production, pt. 2, In Fish Canning and Curing, (c) Employees and Salaries and Wages.”

⁴⁴ The unionization of B.C. shoreworkers began about the same time as in Alaska, in the early 1930s, but was not a steady feature in the province until about 1941, with the formation of the Fish Cannery, Reduction Plant, and Allied Workers' Union, local 89. Muszynski, “The Organization of Women and Ethnic Minorities in a Resource Industry.”

⁴⁵ Author's private communication with Allan Sheppard (former gill net manager, Port Edward cannery), Port Edward, B.C., 3 March 1989.

⁴⁶ Doyle Papers, box 6, file 4.

⁴⁷ This was typical for the canning industry in general. See Keuchel, “Development of the Canning Industry in New York State,” 293–94; Ruiz, Cannery Women, 24–26.

⁴⁸ See Newell, The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry, chaps. 3 and 4.

⁴⁹ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, tables 16–19, 195–97.

⁵⁰ Henry Doyle estimated the cost breakdown for his Mill Bay, B.C. cannery, over the period from 1916 to 1919, as follows: for machine-packed chum salmon (the cheapest salmon to purchase) in one-pound cans, fish accounted for 19.75 percent and labor 18.1 percent of the packing cost, whereas for hand-packed sockeye (the most expensive salmon to purchase) in half-pound cans, fish accounted for 38.5 percent, and labor 11.6 percent, of the packing cost (Doyle Papers, box 6, file 14, “Mill Bay Cannery, Season 1916 to 1919”; ibid., file 23, “Summary, Average Cost of Packs, 1922, Northern Canneries”). Gregory and Barnes examined the distribution of the average price received per case for canned Alaska salmon in 1937 using a representative sample of canneries from all three districts and found that fish accounted for 55.1 percent of the total packing cost, and labor accounted for only 12.5 percent. (North Pacific Fisheries, 193–94.)

⁵¹ The Alaskan packers set the world price. The Pacific Fisherman Yearbook [title varies] (1903—) reported annually the opening prices for United States and Canadian canned salmon.

⁵² The duty was 15 percent ad valorum until 1922, when raised to 25 percent.

⁵³ See note 50.

⁵⁴ For the coast states see O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1864–1924,” chap. 3; Cooley, Richard, Politics and Conservation: The Decline of the Alaska Salmon (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, chaps. 3 and 4; Carrothers, British Columbia Fisheries, 63–81.

⁵⁵ Cooley, Politics and Conservation, 153.

⁵⁶ Great Britain has always been the world's leading importer of canned salmon, especially of the red variety. Dianne Newell, “The Politics of Food in World War II: Great Britain's Grip on Canada's Pacific Fishery,” [Canadian Historical Association], Historical Papers/Communications historiques (1988): 180–81; Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 170, fig. 17. On diversification, see Newell, “Dispersal and Concentration,” 31–33.

⁵⁷ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 106; DBS, Fisheries Statistics, 1937, II, “Agencies of Production, pt. 2, In Fish Canning and Curing, (c) Employees and Salaries and Wages.”

⁵⁸ O'Bannon, “Waves of Change,” 561.

⁵⁹ Brown and Philips found this to be the case for California fruit and vegetable canning, where it was difficult to recruit and keep a suitable seasonal labor force (“Decline of the Piece-Rate System in California Canning,” 574–77).

⁶⁰ Doyle Papers, box 5, file 6. Doyle was the first general manager of British Columbia Packers Association, which he left in 1904 to become owner and manager of Mill Bay and half a dozen other cannery operations in Northern B.C.

⁶¹ O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1864–1924,” 146.

⁶² “How Salmon Is Canned,” 19–20. Because of the considerable variation in the average individual size of the different species (see note 14), the average number of fish per 48-pound case of canned salmon in the Nass River, B.C. pack in 1916, for example, was: pinks (14), sockeyes (12), cohos (8), chums (7), and springs (5).

⁶³ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 112 n. 1.

⁶⁴ Newell, “The Politics of Food in World War II,” 189–91.

⁶⁵ British Columbia, Department of Fisheries, The Commercial Fisheries of British Columbia, by Alexander, Geo. J., rev. ed. (Victoria, B.C., 1947), 34Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Chandler, The Visible Hand, chap. 8.

⁶⁷ O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1864–1924,” 27–28; Doyle Papers, box 4, notebook 3, “General Notes,” 3, 10 Aug. 1905.

⁶⁸ O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1864–1924,” 99–100.

⁶⁹ Smith developed and patented (8 Aug. 1905) the machine on his own while living in Seattle, then persuaded Pacific American Fisheries, Inc. to test it in their Puget Sound plants in 1906. McKervill, The Salmon People, 70–73; Victoria Province, 26 July 1906. There had been many rivals; see Stacey, Sockeye and Tinplate, 21.

⁷⁰ Stacey, Sockeye and Tinplate, 22–23; O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1900–1925,” 153. O'Bannon suggests that after the turn of the century cannery operators in B.C., “where canners could still obtain all the Chinese workers they required,” failed to adopt the filling machine (“Waves of Change,” 570). But it was the Indian women and girls (also Japanese women and boys), not Chinese males, who did the handfilling in B.C.

⁷¹ Advertising flyer, Smith Cannery Machines Co.

⁷² O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1864–1924,” 211.

⁷³ Ibid., 199.

⁷⁴ “‘Iron Chink’ a Notable Factor in the Advancement of Salmon Industry,” Pacific Fishermen Yearbook 25 (1927): 112–13Google Scholar; various advertisements for the “Iron Chink” in Pacific Fisherman Yearbook, 1905–1934.

⁷⁵ “Prominent Machinery House Devoted to Salmon Industry,” Pacific Fisherman Yearbook 25 (1927): 116–18Google Scholar. The diffusion of this particular technique is well documented in contemporary issues of the Pacific Fisherman.

⁷⁶ Doyle Papers, box 4, notebook 26, “General Notes,” 13 July, 5 Sept., 21 Nov. 1914; O'Bannon, “Technological Change, 1864–1924,” 263, n. 20.

⁷⁷ Doyle Papers, box 6, file 9, various tables showing can-making profits at two northern canneries (Namu and Mill Bay) for the years 1916 to 1922.

⁷⁸ Gregory and Barnes, North Pacific Fisheries, 112. As thorough as their economic study of the salmon-canning industry is, they unfortunately devote only a few pages to the important topic of technological change.

⁷⁹ Author's interview with Lloyd Stump, Vancouver, B.C., 5 May 1984, who remembers observing this mixed pattern of hand and machine technology at his father's small independent cannery (the Kingcome, or Charles Creek) on Kingcome Inlet, B.C., in the early 1930s.

⁸⁰ Chandler, The Visible Hand, 289–99.

⁸¹ Samuel, Raphael, “The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain,” History Workshop 3 (Spring 1977): 6–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸² Interestingly, Steven Fraser found that in the men's clothing industry in the 1920s the secondary sector that remained small and technologically more primitive produced mainly lower priced and lower quality goods, which is opposite to the situation in salmon canning: “Combined and Uneven Development in the Men's Clothing Industry,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 522–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brown and Philips discovered, among other things, that as much as the fruit and vegetable canning industry wanted to mechanize the preparation tasks, for a long time no machine was fast, accurate, or cheap enough to replace women workers using fifteen-cent pitting spoons: “The Decline of the Piece-Rate System in California Canning,” 574. See also Whatley, Warren C., “Southern Agrarian Labor Contracts as Impediments to Cotton Mechanization,” Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 45–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.