The damming of the Saguenay brought industrialisation on a grand scale
to rural Quebec in the form of newsprint and aluminum manufacture.
Tapping into rich and diverse sources in Canada, the United States, and
Europe, Massell provides an interdisciplinary, cross-border study of
American capital and Canadian resources. He shows us how ever-larger
amounts of capital yielded increasingly massive and sophisticated
applications of hydroelectric technology. Grand industrial plans, in
turn, encroached upon provincial water rights and farmers' lands, which
drew the attention of the state. He examines the protracted power
struggle between public and private interests - between American
capitalists and the nascent bureaucracy of the province of Quebec - and
describes the origins and evolution of the events that led to state
control over hydraulic resources in the province. In doing so he
provides vivid portraits of Duke and of Quebec politicians of the period
and gives a dramatic account of the protracted battle of wits between
Duke's chief engineer, William States Lee, and Quebec's chief of
Hydraulic Service, Arthur Amos. Amassing Power speaks to the integration
of North American economies, vividly illustrating the process by which
American capital drew Canada's resource-rich North into the economic
orbit of the United States.