Naylor began his work in investigative history in the 1960s (a.k.a. the last great decade) and he was motivated to study Canadian business in an attempt to answer the then popular question: why is there so much foreign ownership in the Canadian economy? He came to the conclusion that Canadian capital was complicit in the process up to its armpits. Foreign capital had in no sense forced itself in; rather it had been invited in. Canada was "open for business" a century before Brian Mulroney made that the sycophantic sell-out slogan of the 1980s.

Naylor knew his economic history, and not just for Canada. The European experience was suggestive of two paths of industrialization: a strong path where indigenous entrepreneurs emerged as industrialists and muscled their way into the capitalist class; a weak, and derivative, path where established mercantile business extended its control over industry. Could this way of thinking be applied to Canada? There were important differences from the original European example. Canada was born in the staple trades, like fish and fur, and by the time it began seriously to industrialize in the late 19th century the American-pioneered multinational corporation was moving to centre stage. The staple trades, whatever their virtues, had moored, and mired, Canada in that mercantile pre-industrial phase where merchants and financiers called the tune. Industrialization had taken place by the invitation of those elites; the foreign companies had come, allied themselves with the elites, and taken over the country. By the standards of mature industrial capitalism, Canada's capitalists had chosen the weak path for Canada. They were hardly the heroes of Canadian history.

This provacative thesis Naylor demonstrates with the detail that justifies the bulk of the tome you have in hand. And do not be put off by its size; rather, since it is so eminently readable, the more the merrier. Serious scholar though he most certainly is, Naylor is also part of that great tradition of muckraking that is so sorely needed if we are to have a rounded portrait of business. (If there is little muckraking today, it is not because of the shortage of muck but rather, regretably, a paucity of rakers; it is not a skill that the university or the media reward.) Naylor is today known as one of the leading writers in the political economy of crime (His 1986 work, Hot Money has also been reissued by Black Rose.) Some might see in this a dramatic career shift. But from a criminological perspective the present volume, with its appalling recitation of scams and scandals, of corporate brigandage and governmental corruption, can be seen as a comprehensive account of the history of white collar crime in Canada.

With that serendipity characteristic of the world of creativity, Naylor's work as an economic historian was being neatly complemented by studies of the Canadian corporate elite by the sociologist Wallace Clement, notably in his Continental Corporate Power (1977). We now know that what both of them, and others, were doing was creating a new scholarly paradigm that came to be called the New Canadian Political Economy. Specifically, Naylor and Clement were formulating an argument about the comprador quality of the Canadian business class that has come to be known as the Naylor-Clement thesis and is one of the central ideas of the new indigenous scholarship. (Toronto Compradors would have been a much more appropriate name for the new NBA basketball team than Toronto Raptors.) The branch-plant dependent character of Canadian industrialization that persists, to the country's discredit, down to the present day is the product of this primal corporate dependency.

The pioneering studies of Naylor and Clement showed the way for a spate of further work within the new political economy paradigm on the causes and consequences of foreign ownership. Two that particularly stand out are Glen Williams, Not for Export: Toward a Political Economy of Canada's Arrested Industrialization and Gordon Laxer's Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada. So respectable, yet threatening, did this way of thinking become that it manifested itself within the Science Council of Canada which began to talk about the truncation of Canadian industry consequent on its branch plant character and was rewarded by being abolished. So too when the Mulroney government and the Business Council on National Issues commissioned a study from Harvard Business School guru Michael Porter on Canada's economic prospects, they got back in Canada at the Crossroads not only the customary neoconservative gibberish about competitiveness but an indictment of Canada's branch plant economy that sounded remarkably like that of the New Canadian Political Economy. (Of course, when Porter was accused by the aforementioned business journalists of raising doubts about the benefits of foreign ownership to Canada and generally threatening the conventional wisdom, he quickly denied that his report should be so read.)

The twenty years since Naylor wrote seems itself like a long time ago. The importance of foreign ownership relative to Canadian ownership in the Canadian economy actually fell in the 1970s and 1980s, though the rising extent of trade dependence on the United States - and the increasing amount of the increasing Canadian debt held outside Canada - meant that the dependent and vulnerable character of the Canadian economy had not changed, meerely the specific form in which it manifested itself. Meanwhile, the Canadian business class got its act together in an unprecedented way when the CEOs of the 150 biggest private sector corporations created the previously alluded to Business Council on National Issues in the mid- 70s. The commanding heights of Canadian capitalism were made visible and it was, in fact more or less as Naylor and Clement had theorized it: an alliance of Canadian financial capital (the big banks), American industrial capital, and staple (or resource) capital regardless of nationality; Canadian industrial capital was forever missing.

In a manner wholly consistent with what Naylor shows to have been the pattern of the past, this new assemblage of capital promptly decided that the way to demonstrate its clout (it was, of course, overwhelmingly male) was to con Canada into signing a free trade agreement with the United States. It thereby put at risk, as it had in the days of the National Policy, the very Canadian economy that it had just asserted its mastery of. At a time when business can apparently do no bad, we desparately need a new Naylor to bring up to date the true and sordid story of the Canadian variant.

It is a mark of this miserable decade of the 90s that foreign ownership is no longer an issue - except in the perverse sense of how best to attract more of it. But it has long been understood by those who would look up and see the skyscrapers that what foreign ownership is really all about is the power of giant multinational corporations who rule the world from on high. In any society that claims to be democratic, how can that not be an issue? The much touted freedom of the market masks the reality of the monopoly of capital.

Advertising is everywhere; you cannot urinate at the University of Toronto without being advised on what beer to drink - the better that you should return, see the ad, and go on and on till your wallet or your bladder gives out. Companies demand our loyalty as consumers but, as the mania of downsizing has made only too clear, give none to us as their employees. Corporations dictate to countries the terms under which investment shall take place - but can say nothing about human rights since that would violate national sovereignty. Under the guise of out-sourcing, companies in the First World pretend to know nothing of their exploitation of children in the Third World. As I write there is much hand-wringing about how the just- released Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People cost an astronomical $58 million; only a reader of the financial pages is likely to know that Canada's Big Six domestic banks are on track to top $6 billion in profits in 1996 - 100 times as much in one year alone. When the resource runs out, resource-companies run away to new supplies and leave the environmental messes behind for governments, to which they do their best to pay no taxes, to clean up. Executives of major tobacco companies solemnly swear that for the longest time they had no idea that smoking was bad for our health. Wearing their corporate costumes, Conrad Black owns most of Canada's newspapers and Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch most of the world's airwaves. (The brilliant British TV dramatist Dennis Potter, when told he had a fatal tumour, named it Rupert the better to curse it.) Surely such things cannot long last without widespread revulsion and dissent - if you can find some place to express it!

Naylor writes in this book as an economic historian, of which there is a long and honourable tradition in Canada. Lately economic history has fallen on hard times and degenerated into the application of economic theory and statistical technique to history. (Perhaps someone should take these two volumes of Naylor's and add up the sum total of the swindles.) Naylor writes of economic history driven by people, with all their wants and all their warts. Naylor also writes as a historian of business in sharp contrast with such an eminent mainstream practitioner as University of Toronto historian Michael Bliss who hails the foreign ownership that results in there not being the archives with which to write Canadian business history and seems (dare I say it) blissfully unaware of the contradiction.

Lest you doubt that this book is both controversial and a classic, let me tell you a little story in which I play a minor role. When Naylor first tried to publish this book, he did what every scholar at the time had to do in order to get an academic book in print. He applied to the then Social Science Research Council for the subsidy for scholarly publications. The result was pure pandemonium. It culminated with those favourable to the publication of the book - including yours truly - being told that we were incapable of making an objective scholarly judgement. (In my case I had committed the ultimate academic sin of being a political activist.) Alas for the Social Science Research Council, it had not learned something about which I now routinely warn my students: if you cross Naylor, not only will you be on the wrong side of truth, you do so at your peril. (You'd better like this book!) The Council caved in and the grant was made.

Jump ahead a decade, and the successor body, the Social Science Federation of Canada decides to honour the 20 most outstanding books among the some 2,000 titles that have been subsidized over the 50 years in which this has been done. Two books in Canadian economic history make the list. The first is the monumental Fur Trade in Canada by the great Harold Innis. The second is History of Canadian Business 1867-1914 by R.T. Naylor. Enough said. Read on.