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Situate, lying, and being in the city of Vancouver’ : independent real estate entrepreneurs, 1884-1893

University of British Columbia

This paper is an attempt to describe the character of business enterprise in nineteenth century Vancouver by examining real estate businessmen during the city's first boom from 1884-1893. Throughout the 1880s the area could still be described as a 'frontier' environment where rapid growth, general uncertainty, and fluid economic and social boundaries meant that the people who took an active role in a city's founding were crucial in determining the city's business culture. What makes Vancouver's situation intriguing was the fact that businessmen representing a hierarchy of salaried corporate executives, specifically the managers of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and businessmen representing a very individualistic approach to enterprise, converged on the south shore of Burrard Inlet at the same time. While not unique to Vancouver, these two conceptions of business, active on a large scale at approximately the same time, created a commercial identity and environment particular to Vancouver. Using Alfred Chandler's four stage model on the changing relationship of business and entrepreneurship to society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this paper proposes to show that, instead of following an evolutionary process of ever increasing business size and complexity through time, Vancouver's real estate industry and general business community retained the characteristics of independent personal enterprise to a greater degree than the dominant position of the CPR would suggest. Even when attempts were made to establish institutions of self-interested collectivism or move toward a style of entrepreneurial capitalism, they were all effectively applied to the advantage of the individual. The voluntary and membership organizations such as the Vancouver Real Estate Board, and the Vancouver Board of Trade, the new business syndicates like the Vancouver Improvement Company and the Vancouver Loan, Trust, Savings, and Guarantee Company, and the decisions to enter the municipal, provincial, and federal political arenas were still dominated by an individualist creed. Until the maturation of the staple based industries enabled other enterprises to adopt managerial capitalism, the philosophy of the business community would remain heavily influenced by a personal enterprise form of business operation.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-02-09

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4311

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University of British Columbia

UBCV

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