The Past Speaks

I’ve discovered an interesting new book in the field of Canadian business history, broadly defined. Donica Belisle’s Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada was published by UBC Press last month.

The book blurb is as follows:
The experience of walking down a store aisle – replete with displays, sales people, and infinite choice – is so common we often forget retail has a short history. Retail Nation traces Canada’s transformation into a modern consumer society back to an era – 1890 to 1940 – when department stores such as Eaton’s ruled the shopping scene and promised to strengthen the nation. Department stores emerge as agents of modern nationalism, but the nation they helped to define – white, consumerist, middle-class – was morelimited, and contested, than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.

More info here.

It will be very interesting to see what Dr. Belisle has to say about the French language and national chain department stores, which is obviously the issue that dominates the social memory of Canadian department stores (and mail order catalogues) in this period.  In the famous Roch Carrier story The Hockey Sweater, the francophone narrator’s mother sends a letter to the Eaton’s Catalogue warehouse in the Anglo-Protestant bastion of Toronto ordering a Montreal Canadiens hockey jersey for her son. Due to a linguistic mix-up, the sweater that arrives carries the logo of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team that is the arch-rival of the Canadiens.