ABSTRACT
In the 1930s it was a staple thesis. It became a theory at the hands of Wynne Plumptre at the end of the 1930s, but even then it looked nothing like what came to be called the staple theory in the 1960s. The thesis was complete long before Keynsian economics was understood, let alone accepted, in Canada. It was complete before Canadians took an interest in international trade as something other than an opaque, uncontrollable external force. It was conceived in the context of an historical critique of neoclassical economics in a period when neoclassical economics went far in accommodating the critique, purging itself of unconscious value judgements and then accommodating the non-market and imperfect market institutions of historical reality. It was an attempt to make theory in the context of history, so that as neoclassical theory accommodated historical reality its accommodations were, after a fashion, absorbed into the thesis. The staple thesis was a microeconomic general disequilibrium analysis of a specific economy.
