Still a hewer of wood

I once was introduced to Arthur Lower, one of the more prominent Canadian historians of the first half of the 20th Century.  He was long retired but meeting him was a moment akin to today's junior hockey player being introduced to, say, Bobby Orr - someone you knew of as a big name but never imagined encountering directly.
One Lower work I admired was Great Britain's Woodyard, which I found an engrossing explication of how the British North American colonies failed to benefit from the sudden emergence of a new major industry - forestry.  The boom was precipitated largely by the French Revolutionary, and more particularly, the Napoleonic Wars, in Europe.  Britain at the time, still largely in the thrall of mercantilist economic theory, insisted that BNA export only primary product, squared timber for the most part.  Proto-Canadians had seasonal jobs in the bush, but capital accumulation occurred in the United Kingdom and the United States. [Americans owned some of the forestry companies.]
So it was a sobering deja vu when I read a recent article about increasing Canadian lumber sales to China.  A full two centuries later, and there they were - squared timber and rough logs arriving in China. 

How little we have learned.  How colonial we remain.