Dr. Don Nerbas

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Email: donald.nerbas@mcgill.ca

Don Nerbas is Associate Professor and the St. Andrew’s Society/McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, and a McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Research Fellow. He is also a member of the Montreal History Group / Groupe d’histoire de Montréal. His current book project examines the rise of the Cape Breton coal industry. Situating Cape Breton’s Sydney coalfield within the entangled histories of colonialism and industrialism, the project seeks to reconstruct the nineteenth-century history of Cape Breton coal and to provide new perspective on the origins and character of industrial capitalism in the Maritime region and Canada. This project emerges from Don’s past work on the region’s history and his interest in the history of capitalism. Recent publications include “Scots, Capitalism, and the Colonial Countryside: Impressions from Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton,” History Compass 18, 11 (November 2020) and “Empire, Colonial Enterprise, and Speculation: Cape Breton’s Coal Boom of the 1860s,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, 6 (2018). He is the author of Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914-1947 (University of Toronto Press, 2013).