Battling Corporate Fiefdoms: How can learnings from the evaluation of company town developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries be applied to modern corporate-dominated settlements? 

It’s easy to think that corporations are at their mightiest strength when some corporations have an estimated net worth higher than one country, or several countries - combined… Yet this has happened time, and time again, in the 15th and 19th century. While the British East India Company was able to overthrow and occupy the Mughal Empire with a private army and subsequently rule with a de facto legal administration, the Company was run in a London-based office of no more than 30 bureaucrats. In the 19th century, captains of industry set up company towns: urban settlements controlled by a single company by employing or importing the majority of a town’s population to work, sleep, and live in a single town. Some were debt-traps, but most company towns were advertised as urban visions of paternal goodwill and high contemporary living standards.

This raised my research question: Could corporations possess more power than nation-states in favourable economic conditions and spatial environments? And when they did, were their seemingly enlightened treatment of workers fair and generous, or provided through necessity and threat of legal punishment?

My paper studied four case studies of company towns that employ population majorities to compare and contrast historical precedents to recommend spatial interventions. For this research, I travelled across America: from Pullman in Chicago, centre of the 1894 Pullman strike; to San Bernardino in California, where Amazon employs a significant share of the city’s population under back-breaking, if not Herculean, working conditions. I took photos, made drawings, and understood ground situations much more clearly than I would have absorbed from Google Maps. Apart from legal restrictions, companies haven’t changed much: most large corporations are still ignorant of the implications of their involvement in disingenuous urban development and initiatives which allow both white and blue-collar employees to be exploited without proper financial compensation. The research affirmed current suggestions of creating more transparent working and pay-level environments, which allow unions to form without undue harassment and can ensure stronger working protections in the future, plus potential spatial interventions on a human level.

My inspiration for this topic personally came from the profound impact that my upbringing as a science fiction nerd with Catholic values had on me. On one hand, growing up, deeply personal experiences made me question: what incentivises people to be nice, if not at opportunity cost with no return? As Catholics, we are taught to treat others in need, and expect nothing in return. How do the benefits of altruism manifest, and to what extent is altruism innocuous? What incentivised the 19th century elites, from John D. Rockefeller to Andrew Carnegie, to become heavy philanthropists — on levels that today’s wealthiest leaders have yet to parallel in quantity and living memory? And in today’s extreme wealth inequality, can we sustain the same, if not even higher, levels of contribution back to the social good?

Simultaneously, the itch of corporate altruism was a fascinating subject that rose back into the surface of my mind while reading cyberpunk fiction, including Philip Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and William Gibson (Neuromancer). Gibson, for his ironic interpolative interpretations of future corporations overtaking the prominence of nation-states following a nuclear war, envisioned corporations as warring factions, using hostile coercion and violence in corporate transfers and IP theft; as well as cross-pollinating Japanese notions of corporate fealty to ultimately portray corporations as feudal kingdoms.  This inspired me to question: Just what is it that makes today’s companies so different, so appealing? In the 2000s and 2010s, Silicon Valley startups were known for their quirky work culture beyond having just an office. They offered snacks, yoga workouts, sleeping pods and more. Combined with my prejudice towards total altruism, I wondered if employees were able to thrive in environments that transcended typical productive spaces. These two factors were the driving catalysts behind my research.

To be a Laidlaw Scholar is to have the tools and resources at my disposal to achieve goals that I could not typically achieve on my own. To have these tools at my disposal represents a path of progress starting from the potential that people saw in me, from my research advisor, to the Laidlaw programme coordinators at the University of Toronto, and acceptance among my peers. To be a Laidlaw Scholar is an affirmation of my self-worth and potential to be more than just a scholar.

US President John F. Kennedy speaks to me as a visionary that not only navigated a dangerous era of international diplomacy with tact during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but sent a message of hope beyond Americans, to people across the world for international collaboration. During his short but memorable time as president, JFK’s decision to commit the US to the space race set the US on a path that resulted in an explosion of space exploration, in which major world powers including but not limited to China, Russia, and India, have been able to collaborate on in spite of political tensions that continue to beleaguer relationships on the ground. The collaboration between superpowers in space inspires me as a message of hope towards achieving goals larger than political interests. His actions and personal qualities as a leader serve as a role model I hope to emulate through my own actions and words.

The year is 2054. We’ve been too late to stop the global average temperature from rising three degrees Celsius and killing a good portion of living beings on the planet, but we have made major changes to our lifestyles in efforts to put the planet before ourselves, finding new ways to proportionally leverage voices that are negatively affected by poor policies. We do not live apart, but together in communities that support neighbours in terms of physical and mental resources designed to serve, and last for generations to come. We may have been battered by a storm of our own making, but the worst has come to pass. With sensible and sustainability-oriented philosophies at the helm, it is time to restore and appreciate the wonders of our planet.

Waking up after a long night’s sleep.