Abstract
Geography matters. While this may sound trite, no other phrase quite captures the arguments and conclusions found in historian Neil White’s recent reexamination of company towns. In Company Towns: Corporate Order and Community, White “reevaluates and complicates” the long-standing narratives of company towns, challenging structuralist interpretations of company towns that fostered the stereotypical views of these municipalities as hardscrabble, grim products of corporate capital and planning. Instead, White works to develop a more nuanced, place-specific understanding of these communities that highlights the “variability of places that the received wisdom assures us are all the same” (8).
White constructs a comparative study of two company towns, Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada and Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia. Corner Brook is a mill town, home to one of the largest paper mills in eastern Canada. Mount Isa, on the other hand, is a mining center, the site of a large ore mine in northeastern Australia. Both towns were founded in the 1920s by companies searching to reestablish themselves in the wake of the economic upheaval that occurred during and after the First World War.
Despite their similar roots, White paints a picture of two very distinct places. These differences start with the founding of each town and continue as residents, political institutions, and the corporate parents of each community engage in efforts to build both successful production facilities and towns while simultaneously striving to navigate a rapidly changing global economy. Furthermore, the lived experiences of inhabitants in each town are quite unique.
One of the many ways that White chooses to elaborate on the distinctiveness of experiences in these towns is by examining labor relations. While both production facilities have a long-standing union presence, organized labor in Mount Isa has been much more militant, highlighted by a contentious seven-month work stoppage in 1964-65 that continues to inform the lived experience of Mount Isa. What emerges from the many examples in this work is a glimpse into a complex web of power dynamics that has fashioned each community, enabling different social and economic relationships to emerge and prosper. Ultimately, these webs of power, contestation, and adaption have allowed each town to adapt differently—and with varying levels of success—to ever-changing local and global conditions.
Throughout this book White is actually tracing the emergence of two places; places that began as similar corporate-planned, company-dominated towns but diverged over time. Although attention to geographic scholarship around place would strengthen the theoretical basis of his arguments, White does convincingly argue that while both towns are the product of twentieth-century corporate planning, their local conditions—ranging from their location to the effectiveness of their parent corporations in navigating the global economy—have created two distinctive towns. This work reminds us that company towns, just like any other place, are not homogeneous.
White effectively intervenes into the literature that has developed around company towns. His pursuit of this work as an unconventional comparative study helps demonstrate some of the many ways that these towns vary. Furthermore, this narrative reinforces the importance of multiple readings of our world, especially as we examine the many ways that actions are enabled and constrained at different geographic scales. Yet this work does not suffer for excessive attention to minutiae; rather, it is highly readable and tells an engaging story about life in these two towns. For labor educators, union leaders, and other scholars, this work has many valuable lessons. Perhaps what is most important, however, is the concrete reminder that we must pay attention to local conditions when we are examining the world. Otherwise, we fail to see what is possible.