The Evolution of Giant Firms in Britain: A Study of the Growth of Concentration in Manufacturing Industry in Britain 1909-70

taken to be 1) why British direct investment in Canada was so limited and expanded so much less than American and, 2) why it was not on the whole very profitable. One might think that the former would have been a consequence of the latter but that interrelationship is not much explored. Paterson finds British investors little involved in the urban, industrial growth of central Canada; they were missing where the action was at the time. He suggests that British manufacturing and British technology may have been best suited to those activities in which Britain had a comparative advantage and not profitably pursued under North American conditions. British investors who were interested in direct investment in Canada turned instead to lines like mining and land speculation where thorough knowledge of local conditions was especially important. Too much authority was retained in Britain to do well in those lands of ventures. It must be left to the specialists on British overseas investment to pass judgment on whether the direct investment in Canada was any less successful than comparable ventures elsewhere. Paterson offers some carefully assembled and quite tantalizing evidence to gnaw on.