Essays

B.C. Sugar was the nation's fifth largest sugar company. But what many Canadians don't know is that it also had sugar plantations abroad. This essay documents this history.

Canadian sugar was built on enslavement and indenture.

As their own records reveal, the Hudson’s Bay Company and Eaton’s were not only retailers. They were also instruments of colonization.

Wartime rationing and postwar recovery indicates that consumer culture is more resilient than it looks.

What the history of Canadian consumer culture tells us about shopping under uncertainty.