A World through Commerce: Explorations in Upper Canada (and Beyond)

Abstract

In this article, Douglas McCalla offers a necessarily selective account of an academic trajectory, with emphasis on the encouragement and the scholarly community that made it possible. Like a number of those contributing to this series, he had not foreseen becoming a historian until discovering that he was one. An interest in economic and business history began with a curiosity about urban business leadership and the trade with Britain that sustained it, then extended to an interest in the entire colonial economy. For Upper Canada, a mainly rural society, the story found in textbooks came to seem increasingly inadequate as an account of the realities of economic life. He set out to find evidence on how people lived, knowledge essential to understanding their choices and the economy they built.