David Alexander (7) (1939–1980)

[excerpt from Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) website]
David George Alexander, who died at his home in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the early hours of July 25, 1980, at the age of forty-one, was one of Canada's foremost economic historians.

Born in Nanaimo in 1939, he began his university work at Victoria College, graduating with his B.A. from U.B.C. in 1961. His graduate studies took him first to the University of Washington and then to the London School of Economics, his thesis for the latter institution being published in 1970 under the title Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution.

In I967 Alexander took an appointment at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and quickly turned his attention to the history of Newfoundland and the Atlantic region of Canada generally. There followed a brilliant series of articles and in 1977 a strikingly original book, The Decay of Trade: An Economic History of the Newfoundland Saltfish Trade, 1935-1965.

In 1971 Alexander helped form at Memorial the Maritime History Group, which was given a large collection of shipping records by the Public Record Office in London. His work in cataloguing these records and in the research of the M.H.G., funded by an SSHRC negotiated grant, on the history of shipping in Atlantic Canada occupied much of his time in the last years of his life.

But Alexander was never a man to be held to one project or one idea. His was an unusual combination of intellectual gifts; well versed in economic theory and skilled in mathematics, he was also a lucid prose stylist, a man for whom the social sciences and humanities were ultimately one and indivisible. His view of learning was well expressed in his 1975 review article for the Dalhousie Review on "Canadian Higher Education"; and his particular intellectual bent made the Journal of Canadian Studies a natural vehicle for his ideas.