Each of these books recovers a piece of Canadian history that was deliberately obscured: the violence behind the sugar industry, the political lives of consumers, and the exclusionary nationalism built by department stores. Together they trace a single supply chain back to its source, travelling from the store to the cane field, from what Canadian consumer culture promised to what it concealed.
Violence of Sugar
Girmit and Canadian Business in Colonial Fiji
Forthcoming, 2026
In the early twentieth century, B.C. Sugar, western Canada's most powerful sugar corporation, operated cane plantations in colonial Fiji. Indentured people from India worked the cane fields for five years and more under conditions of violence, illness, and starvation. The sugar they grew travelled across the Pacific to B.C. Sugar's refinery, then to Canadian grocery shelves, then to Canadian kitchens.
Violence of Sugar is a Canadian reckoning with that history. Drawing on archives in Canada and Fiji, and on related records, it documents the history of girmit in Fiji and asks why so many Canadians remain unaware of their sugar's violent origins.
Harvested sugarcane. Photo by Victoria Priessnitz.Sugarcane plumes. Photo by Henry Lim.
Purchasing Power
Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture
University of Toronto Press, March 2020 · 304 pp · Studies in Gender and History series · DOI: 10.3138/9781442625860
What Canadians bought, and refused to buy, was a form of political action. Drawing on the records of organizations including the National Council of Women, the Women's Institutes, and the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Purchasing Power recovers how settler women used consumption as a vehicle for public advocacy, artistic expression, and economic change across the twentieth century.
Canada's department stores did far more than sell goods. Between 1890 and 1940, Eaton's, Simpson's, and the Hudson's Bay Company sold a vision of what Canada was and should be: consumerist, middle-class, and British. Retail Nation examines these institutions from multiple angles: as sites of spectacle and desire for shoppers, as workplaces for tens of thousands of predominantly female clerks, and as active agents in building a national identity that was exclusionary.
Pierre Savard Award, International Council for Canadian Studies Best Book in Canadian Studies, Canadian Studies Network Honourable Mention, Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association Shortlisted, John W. Dafoe Book Prize
“Retail Nation constitutes an important contribution … It describes the rise, flourishing and decline of three Canadian department stores … which eventually became icons of English Canadian nationhood. … While the author acknowledges the role nostalgia has played in our image of department stores, she does not lose sight of the social and other costs such chains have exacted. … Belisle explores fully and intelligently the unequal relations of class, race and gender they embodied … The book is written with verve, a secure knowledge of the relevant literature and much careful research, and sets a historiographic benchmark for the study of Canadian consumer society.”
— Canadian Historical Association
Newspaper advertisement for T. Eaton Co., Christmas edition. The Globe (Globe Printing Co.), December 25, 1907. Library and Archives Canada. Public domain.T. Eaton Co. Christmas Catalogue No. 67, 1904. Unknown, 1904. Archives of Ontario, F 229-231-0-4. Public domain.
