The Railway King of Canada: Sir William Mackenzie, 1849-1923 - Hardcover

Fleming, Rae

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774803827 ISBN 13: 9780774803823

Verlag: University of British Columbia Press, 1991

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Fleming Robert B

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Reseña del editor

During the first two decades of the 20th century, Sir William Mackenzie was one of Canada's best known entrepreneurs. He spearheaded some of the largest and most technologically advanced projects ever undertaken in Canada, building enterprises that became the foundations for such major institutions as Canadian National Railways, Brascan, and the Toronto Transit Commission. He built a business empire that stretched from Montreal to British Columbia and to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil. It included gas, electric, telephone and transit utilities, railroads, hotels, and steamships as well as substantial coal mining, whaling and timber interests. For a time, Mackenzie also owned Canada's largest newspaper, "La Presse". He accumulated an enormous personal fortune, but when he died in 1923 his estate was virtually bankrupt as a result of the dramatic collapse of his Canadian Northern Railway during the First World War. In an era when the entrepreneur has come to be seen as a media hero, and when struggles about the role of state enterprise in the transport and energy sectors consume public policy debate, it is ironic that Mackenzie is largely forgotten by all but a few historians and railway aficionados. Mackenzie left no papers to guide biographers, but after a decade of gathering and piecing together fragments from a wide array of sources, Rae Fleming has written this biography of the man the German press extolled as the "Railway King of Canada". Mackenzie was wily, crafty, manipulative and intimidating. Starting as a general contractor in rural Ontario, he built a small fortune; he then moved on to bigger things. He funded the first full-length documentary movie, was toasted in the House of Lords, received a knighthood from King George V, and developed close friendships with the politicians of his day. In a business biography intended as much for general readers as for scholarly audience, Fleming offers a revisionist perspective on Mackenzie. He dispels the simplistic approach of those historians and journalists who have depicted Mackenzie and his partner, Sir Donald Mann, as melodramatic crooks who could have stepped from the pages of "Huckleberry Finn".

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: University of British Columbia Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0774803827
• ISBN 13: 9780774803823
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 632