Edited by Â鶹AV professor Don Nerbas, University of Toronto professor Dimitry Anastakis and Dawson College Faculty member Elizabeth Kirkland, ,Ěýis an edited volume that takes us back to nineteenth-century Canada, where the Golden Square Mile, one of Montreal’s most elite residential districts was a centre of politics, wealth, architecture and influence.
Many Â鶹AVians will recognize familiar, everyday sites within the book’s chapters; after all, the Square Mile’s iconic architecture and street names are carefully woven into the fabric of Â鶹AV campus life.
The neighbourhood’s history is one marked by the region’s topography, Montreal and Canada’s history of colonialism, and the twentieth-century expansion into an urban metropole of world recognition.
On September 27th, readers can join Professor Nerbas for the book launch of Montreal’s Square Mile” at Â鶹AV’s Faculty Club, from 3PM to 5PM.
Professor Nerbas, who serves as the St.Andrew’s Society/McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies, spoke to us about the origins of the book, Â鶹AV’s connection to the Golden Square Mile, and and his upcoming research projects.
Q: How did the idea of this book come about? What was the editorial process like?
A: The idea for the book emerged from a conference that Dr. Elizabeth Kirkland and I organized on the Square Mile in the summer of 2019. We both had overlapping but distinct interests in the history of the Square Mile. I had come to the subject through my earlier work on the Canadian bourgeoisie and postwar transformation of Montreal’s downtown with the construction of Place Ville-Marie, as well as my ongoing work on coal. And Dr. Kirkland’s research on the political and social worlds of elite women in Montreal during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries brought the Square Mile directly into her focus. Our idea was to bring different subfields of history and disciplines into conversation with one another about the Square Mile’s history, and also to expand the geographical frame of analysis to capture how this elite neighbourhood was made from and interacted with a wider world, beyond the city itself. The results of the conference confirmed our suspicions that there were good reasons to develop a book, and Prof. Dimitry Anastakis, Chair in Canadian Business History at the University of Toronto, joined our editorial team shortly after the conference.
One of the notable and fortunate aspects of the collection is that it assembles the work of scholars who have been at work on different aspects of the Square Mile’s history for years. Sherry Olson, Professor Emerita in Â鶹AV’s Department of Geography, and Robert Sweeny have chapters that harness findings from their long collaboration on the project. Annmarie Adams, architectural historian and holder of the Stevenson Chair at Â鶹AV, brings a deep knowledge of the Square Mile from earlier work to her chapter on Scottish-born architects Percy Nobbs (1875-1964) and Ramsay Traquair (1874-1952) and the Scottish architectural networks they moved in, which facilitated access to professional opportunities and ultimately contributed to shaping the Square Mile’s built environment. Urban historians of Montreal such as Harold BĂ©rubĂ© and Nicolas Kenny both have chapters in the collection addressing the post-1914 period, the beginning of the Square Mile’s relative decline. Gregory Marchildon and Stephen Salmon contributed chapters on business history subjects. And Brian Young, James Â鶹AV Professor Emeritus, whose work over the years has touched various elements of the Square Mile’s history, wrote an Afterword that beautifully distills the collection and offers autobiographical insight into how the Square Mile entered his research. The collection also includes the work of emerging scholars Max Hamon, Jean-Philip Mathieu, and Lisa Moore. It was a great pleasure to work with these scholars and to see the evolution of the project.
Q: What are some interesting anecdotes/stories of Montreal’s Golden Square Mile that readers will discover in the book?
A: Readers may be surprised to learn that before he became Lord Beaverbrook, Max Aitken resided in the Square Mile from 1907 to 1910. Gregory Marchildon’s chapter explores Aitken’s time in Montreal and his activities as a merger promoter, which alienated him from the city’s business establishment. His application for membership in the Mount Royal Club was rejected, and not long after Aitken left for London. On the other hand, Montreal’s Square Mile seeks to correct the singular focus on male business titans that characterizes popular accounts of the neighbourhood’s history. Robert Sweeny’s close analysis of gender and property reveals women, “landed ladies,” as significant and active property owners in the Square Mile. Women came to own one-third of all properties owned by individuals (as opposed to institutions or companies) in the Square Mile.
While ownership often coincided with active control and management, sometimes that wasn’t the case. In 1884 Annie Stevenson Anderson brought a civil suit against her husband, David Morrice, to obtain judicial separation of property. Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore show in their chapter how the law was used in this instance to shift assets to the wife in order to shield them from the husband’s creditors. This Morrice, a textile manufacturer, was a benefactor of the building that bears his name on campus today, Morrice Hall. In addition to the active roles women sometimes played in managing assets and overseeing intergenerational accumulation strategies, Square Mile women also took responsibility for the management of the public images of their families. Elizabeth Kirkland and Mary Anne Poutanen address this issue in their chapter on Amy Redpath Roddick and her efforts to preserve reputation and privacy following shocking family tragedy – the violent deaths of her brother and mother in 1901, ruled a murder-suicide in the coroner’s inquest. While the book explores the big, structural forces that made and shaped the neighbourhood, it is also fundamentally centred on people and their individual and family histories.
Q: How does the book explore Montreal’s colonial past and its influence on the Square Mile as we know it today?
A: The colonial past cannot be disentangled from the Square Mile’s history. It’s important to note that the heyday of the Square Mile in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries coincided with what Canadian historians often call National Policy industrialization. This was a program of domestic industrialization propelled by the western expansion of an industrial political economy. It was, in other words, driven by settler colonialism. The expanding and interconnecting business worlds of Square Mile elites, examined in chapters by Jean-Philip Mathieu and Sherry Olson, cannot be fully understood or explained without registering this historical context. Donald Smith is perhaps one of the most iconic figures of the Square Mile: a Scottish fur trader who became a central figure within the emerging industrial economy of the latter nineteenth century, notably in his connection with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. He also became a Chancellor of Â鶹AV and one of the university’s most significant benefactors, and was made a peer of the British House of Lords in 1897 as Lord Strathcona. Max Hamon expands the Square Mile story to Isabella Sophia Hardisty, Smith’s wife. The daughter of an influential MĂ©tis family connected to the Hudson’s Bay Company, Hardisty was integrated into familial and trade networks that played a significant role in facilitating her husband’s rise to prominence in business and politics. Hamon presents a complex story of the Smith-Hardisty family, one that shows how social relations and family alliances from the fur trade endured to shape the Square Mile itself.
The colonial past was also powerfully shaped by mythologies that have attached themselves to the Square Mile. Roderick MacLeod’s chapter examines how mythology, reaching back to figures such as Scottish fur-trader Simon McTavish and his abandoned mansion on Mount Royal, were in place at the mid nineteenth-century inception of the Square Mile and came to imbue the area with a romantic hue. MacLeod notes that the romanticism of the “Golden Square Mile” continues to resonate in the world of real estate. But the historical Square Mile that emerged in the nineteenth century, its epoch has decidedly passed. In the concluding chapter, Harold Bérubé shows how the profitable sale of residential properties in the post-1945 period precipitated a transformation from residential to commercial space that ultimately produced the built environment of high-rise towers that we know today.
Q: Which Square Mile sites would you suggest Â鶹AV Arts students explore in between their courses this academic year?
Arts students should first recognize that Â鶹AV is itself a Square Mile site. To borrow the words of Brian Young, Â鶹AV was “the Square Mile’s physical and cultural core.” One of the unique features of the book are vignettes – thirteen in total and interspersed between the chapters – by architectural historian Julia Gersovitz. Â鶹AV is the subject of one of the vignettes, accompanied by a Notman photograph of the Arts Building from 1865. Students might consider browsing the vignettes and accompanying illustrations to pique their curiosity. While they’ll be able to identify familiar buildings from nineteenth-century photographs, I suspect they’ll also be struck by how much the built environment has changed, and perhaps even inspired to think about our relationship to the past.
Q: What work and research are currently on the horizon in your role as the St. Andrew’s Society/McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies?
For several years I have been working on a project exploring the industrial expansion of Cape Breton Island’s Sydney coalfield during the long nineteenth century. The project places the local history of the coalfield in its wider and shifting imperial, colonial, and transnational contexts. Cape Breton’s political economy of coal emerged from a distinctive conjuncture of historical forces during the first half of the nineteenth century, encompassing mass migrations from the Hebrides and western Highlands of Scotland, capital investment from London, and the rising urban coal markets of New England and New York. By the end of the century, the island’s coal trade had become recast and reoriented to serve Canada’s largest coal market, Montreal. As these broad shifts occurred, potent forms of popular agency also developed on the coalfield. I hope to complete a book on this subject within the next couple years. My recently published , comes from this larger body of research. And I have also been working with Â鶹AV colleagues Prof. Brian Lewis and Prof. Melissa N. Shaw on an edited volume titled Â鶹AV in History with Â鶹AV-Queen’s University Press, a collection that situates the university’s history in broad historical context and seeks to contribute to an ongoing reassessment of Â鶹AV’s history.
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.