Violence of Sugar: Girmit and Canadian Business in Colonial Fiji. By Rizwaan Abbas and Donica Belisle.
Forthcoming.
This book examines the history of Girmit (indenture of people from India) on Canadian operated plantations in colonial Fiji. It is based on archival research conducted in Canada and Fiji. Maps, statistics, and photographs are included.
A preliminary article from this research is Donica Belisle, “VIOLENCE AND PROFIT: Canada’s Debts to the Girmitiyas of Fiji,” published in a special issue of British Columbia History about Indo-Fijian history, edited by Rizwaan Abbas (Summer 2024, pp. 22-26). For a copy of this article please be in touch.
Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 304 pages.
Why do Canadians consume? This book explores the meanings of consumption in twentieth-century Canada. It argues that many Canadians have viewed consumer goods as tools for belonging, identity, and citizenship.
Exploring the roots of consumer capitalism between the 1890s and the Second World War, Purchasing Power uncovers the significances that Canadians have attached to consumer goods. It suggests that due to their exclusion from politics and employment, many Canadian women leveraged their shopping might to achieve social, personal, and political goals. In this way they became consumer citizens.
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Donica Belisle. Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020.
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Shortlisted for the City of Regina Book Award, 2020.
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Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. 320 pages, 33 b&w photographs.
The experience of walking down a store aisle is now so common that we often forget retail stores barely existed a century ago.
Retail Nation traces Canada’s transformation into a modern consumer nation back to an era when Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company ruled the country’s shopping scene. Between 1890 and 1940, department stores revolutionized selling and shopping. Some Canadians found happiness and fulfillment in their aisles while others experienced nothing more than a cold shoulder and a closed door.
This book will interest historians of Canadian and international retail and consumer culture, along with anyone who wants to know how consumer capitalism came to North America.
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Donica Belisle. Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.
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*Winner, Pierre Savard Award in Canadian Studies, International Council for Canadian Studies
*Winner, Best Book in Canadian Studies, Canadian Studies Network
*Honourable Mention, Sir John A. MacDonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association.
*Shortlist, John W. Dafoe Book Prize, J. W. Dafoe Foundation
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