Content area
Full Text
Stefano Agnoletto, The Italians Who Built Toronto: Italian Workers and Contractors in the City's Housebuilding Industry, 1950-1980 (Bern: Peter Lang 2014)
IN THE ITALIANS Who Built Toronto: Italian Workers and Contractors in the City's Housebuilding Industry 1950-1980, Stefano Agnoletto takes readers into Toronto's construction trades during the post-war economic boom. His focus is the role of Italians in that boom and their "building of Toronto." Agnoletto seeks to build on the work of other pioneers in this field such as Robert Harney, Franca Iacovetta, and Roberto Perin by creating a book that focuses explicitly on the labour and business history of Italians and their "ethnic niche," (189) as he puts it, as tens of thousands of Italians in post-war Toronto became employed in numerous construction trades from bricklayers, carpenters, labourers, and cement finishers. His focus is primarily on the "structural and cultural factors" (16) that were central to Italians in the construction industry and he also debunks the idea that Italians were not supportive or indifferent to unionization in this period.
The book centers on how the creation of ethnicity, such as Italians becoming Italians in Toronto, was connected to macro-economic conjunctures, like a construction boom. Italians discovered themselves, he argues, as members of a larger exploited ethnic group and this was a factor in their developing class consciousness. The book's focus on economics and structural economic forces as well as its plethora of statistical information are its greatest strengths, reflecting Agnoletto's expertise and training as a holder of a PhD in Economic History. While the book tries to detail the cultural elements behind the Italians in the construction trades, it falls slightly short of the mark. Greater exploration of the social history of the historical actors, including gender analysis, is missing here. Yet his in-depth coverage of economic forces and...