Brian Gettler

Brian Gettler is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the political, economic, and social history of colonialism in Canada as well as narratives of national history in Quebec. His work has appeared in several academic journals and edited collections, in both French and English. Gettler’s book, Colonialism’s Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950, analyzes the distinct experiences of three First Nations alongside the monetary dimensions of British and Canadian Indigenous policy and corporate policy in the fur trade. Rather than focusing on the perhaps obvious ways in which wealth shaped politics, it concentrates on money as both a symbol around which discourses of appropriate behaviour were articulated and as a concrete tool in the governance of peoples and lands. Gettler is currently working on the history of public finance and Crown-First Nations fiduciary relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.