Don Nerbas
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 Montréal. 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 19th century, which was powerfully shaped by Scottish migration and settlement, an aspect of the entangled histories of colonialism and industrialism.
Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies webpage: Canadian-Scottish Studies
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Books
- Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914-1947 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) (378 pp.).
- with Dimitry Anastakis and Elizabeth Kirkland, eds. Montreal’s Square Mile: The Making and Transformation of a Colonial Metropole (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.” Labour / Le Travail 92 (Fall 2023): 81-121.
- “Scots, Capitalism, and the Colonial Countryside: Impressions from Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton.” History Compass 18, 11 (November 2020): 1-12.
- “Empire, Colonial Enterprise, and Speculation: Cape Breton’s Coal Boom of the 1860s.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, 6 (2018): 1067-95. [Republished in Lachlan MacKinnon and Andrew Parnaby, eds. Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century: Formations and Legacies of Industrial Capitalism (Athabasca: Athabasca University Press, 2024).]
- “William Zeckendorf, Place Ville-Marie, and the Making of Modern Montreal.” Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine 43, 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.” Histoire sociale / Social History 46, 91 (May 2013): 173-204.
Book Chapter
- “Family, Society, and Highland Identity in an Industrial World,” in Scottish 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.