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.

David Massell is associate professor of history at the University of Vermont and the author of Amassing Power: J.B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897-1927.

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"This book offers a rare, well-documented inside look at the methods of one of North America's most powerful finance capitalists ... readers familiar with the story will find much here that is novel, fascinating, and worth debating; those that come to the subject for the first time will be in the hands of someone with great mastery of the literature with an intriguing story to tell." H.V. Nelles, Department of History, York University "This is a significant piece of scholarship, shedding light on a vital period in the regional development of the Saguenay, as well as on major aspects of the history of hydro-electricity in Quebec." Claude Bellavance, Centre interuniversitaire d'études québécoises, Université du Québec à Trois Rivières

"This book offers a rare, well-documented inside look at the methods of one of North America's most powerful finance capitalists ... readers familiar with the story will find much here that is novel, fascinating, and worth debating; those that come to the subject for the first time will be in the hands of someone with great mastery of the literature with an intriguing story to tell." H.V. Nelles, Department of History, York University
"This is a significant piece of scholarship, shedding light on a vital period in the regional development of the Saguenay, as well as on major aspects of the history of hydro-electricity in Quebec." Claude Bellavance, Centre interuniversitaire d'études québécoises, Université du Québec à Trois Rivières