Marching under Flags Black and Red

This chapter takes a close look at turn-of-the-twentieth century Toronto, offering an account of mass distress that considers how the poor, waged and unwaged, were subjected to state-based regimes of disciple and how they struggled to fight back. By the time Toronto had embarked on its Age of Industry in the 1870s and 1880s, major enterprises employed almost thirteen thousand workers in a population of roughly eighty-five thousand. Decades of socioeconomic differentiation and dislocation had served as the primitive accumulation that fueled the Queen City's material development. Economic crises, devastating in their human toll, punctuated the 1830s, the 1850s, and the 1870s, and would close the century in the 1890s.