Selling Earth observation satellites on their abilities to predict and limit adverse environmental change, politicians, business leaders, the media, and technology enthusiasts have spent sixty years arguing that space exploration can create a more peaceful, prosperous world. Capitalist states have also socialized the risk and privatized the profits of the commercial space industry by convincing taxpayers to fund surveillance technologies as necessary components of sovereignty, freedom, and democracy. Jocelyn Wills’s Tug of War reminds us that colonizing the cosmos has not only accelerated the arms race but also encouraged government contractors to compete for the military and commercial spoils of surveillance. Although Canadians prefer to celebrate their role as purveyors of peaceful space applications, Canada has played a pivotal part in the expansion of neoliberal policies and surveillance networks that now encircle the globe, primarily as a political ally of the United States and component supplier for its military-industrial complex. Tracing the forty-five-year history of Canada’s largest space company – MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) – through the lens of surveillance studies and a trove of oral history transcripts, government documents, trade journals, and other sources, Wills places capitalism’s imperial ambitions squarely at the centre of Canada-US relations and the privatization of the Canadian political economy. Tug of War confronts the mythic lure of technological progress and the ways in which those who profess little interest in war rationalize their leap into military contracting by avoiding the moral and political implications of their work.

Jocelyn Wills is professor of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

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“A timely, compelling (and untold) story of the making of one of the world’s most successful global communications and information companies.” Matthew J. Bellamy, Carleton University and author of Profiting the Crown: Canada’s Polymer Corporation, 1942–19

"Tug of War offers penetrating insight into the extensive and complex partnership between big business and big government and the influence each has on the other – regardless of politics or public opinion – when it comes to surveillance and security techn

"Tug of War is exhaustively researched, providing a comprehensive history. Core to the construction of its narrative are oral history interviews conducted by the author. These accounts are effectively weaved throughout to complement the staggering array o

"Jocelyn Wills' examination of the rise of surveillance capitalism and the security state vis-à-vis the story of MDA is a powerful tour de force of the political economy of science, technology, and global capital at work. I highly recommend this book to a

“Surveillance. Advanced technologies. National security. Multinational capitalism. Tug of War deftly probes and integrates these vexed themes. Through deep research, masterfully contextualized, Wills tracks Canada’s MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (now MDA), a global giant in satellite communications, to show how patriotism and technological enthusiasm gave way to financial ambitions, lured by markets for military and surveillance technologies. A powerful book.” Pamela Walker Laird, University of Colorado Denver, and author of Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing and Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin

"Jocelyn Wills's excellent history of MDA was published just before this perfect moment of closure, which, in Wills's casting, came to conclude the third era of MDA's innovative but always insecure and fraught history as a distinctly Canadian aerospace co