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McGill.CA / Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies / People

Don Nerbas is Associate Professor and the St. Andrew’s Society/McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies. He is also a member of the Montreal History Group / Groupe d’histoire de MontrĂ©al. He has published widely on the politics of business and the political economy of capitalism in Canada. The principal focus of his current research centres on Cape Breton’s coal trade and the social and political history of Cape Breton’s Sydney coalfield in the 19thÌęcentury, which was powerfully shaped by Scottish migration and settlement, an aspect of the entangled histories of colonialism and industrialism. This project is a component of Professor Nerbas's broader efforts, as Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies, to expand and deepen investigation of the complex historical role of the Scots in Canada.

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Selected publications:Ìę

Books

  • Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914-1947Ìę(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) (378 pp.).
  • with Dimitry Anastakis and Elizabeth Kirkland, eds.ÌęMontreal’s Square Mile: The Making and Transformation of a Colonial MetropoleÌę(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2024).

Articles

  • “‘Lawless Coal Miners’ and the Lingan Strike of 1882-83: Remaking Political Order on Cape Breton’s Sydney Coalfield.”ÌęLabour / Le TravailÌę92 (Fall 2023): 81-121.
  • “Scots, Capitalism, and the Colonial Countryside: Impressions from Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton.”ÌęHistory CompassÌę18, 11 (November 2020): 1-12.
  • “Empire, Colonial Enterprise, and Speculation: Cape Breton’s Coal Boom of the 1860s.”ÌęJournal of Imperial and Commonwealth HistoryÌę46, 6 (2018): 1067-95. [Revised version in Lachlan MacKinnon and Andrew Parnaby, eds.ÌęCape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century: Formations and Legacies of Industrial CapitalismÌę(Athabasca: Athabasca University Press, forthcoming 2024).]
  • “William Zeckendorf, Place Ville-Marie, and the Making of Modern Montreal.”ÌęUrban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine43, 2 (Spring 2015): 5-25.
  • “Managing Democracy, Defending Capitalism: Gilbert E. Jackson, the Canadian Committee on Industrial Reconstruction, and the Changing Form of Elite Politics in Canada.”ÌęHistoire sociale / Social HistoryÌę46, 91 (May 2013): 173-204.

Book ChapterÌę

  • “Family, Society, and Highland Identity in an Industrial World,” inÌęScottish Highlands and the Atlantic World: Social Networks and Identities, eds. S. Karly Kehoe, Chris Dalglish, and Annie Tindley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023): 170-93.
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