Canada’s Entrepreneurs from the Fur Trade to 1929 — Course Overview

Canada’s Entrepreneurs from the Fur Trade to 1929 traces the rise, strategies, and social impact of Canadian business leaders from the early fur-trade era through the boom-and-bust of the 1929 Stock Market Crash, using portrait studies to illuminate character, networks, and decision-making.

Course Summary

This richly illustrated, research-driven course combines economic history, biographical portraits, and archival sources to teach you how entrepreneurs shaped Canada’s regional economies, political relationships, and cultural identity between the 17th and early 20th centuries. Expect close readings of primary materials, maps of trading networks, and comparative analyses of entrepreneurial strategies during periods of growth and crisis.

What You’ll Learn

• How fur trade networks laid foundations for later commercial enterprises and infrastructure.
• Biographical case studies of key entrepreneurs and how their personalities and decisions influenced outcomes.
• Economic mechanisms behind regional booms, the role of credit, and the vulnerabilities exposed by the 1929 crash.
• How to read and interpret historical portraits, letters, ledgers, and company records as business evidence.
• Methods for situating individual business actors within broader social, political, and international contexts.

Who Should Take This Course

Undergraduate and graduate students of Canadian history and economic history, museum and archive professionals, history educators, genealogists, and lifelong learners interested in how individual entrepreneurs influenced the shape of modern Canada.

Course Modules (Detailed)

1. Module 1 — The Fur Trade Foundations: Traders, companies, Indigenous partnerships, and the emergence of commercial routes.
2. Module 2 — Merchant Houses & Early Cities: Port enterprises, credit networks, and urban entrepreneurs.
3. Module 3 — Industrial Expansion & Railways: Capital, rail finance, and the business of nation-building.
4. Module 4 — Portraits of Power: Reading portraits and personal papers as sources for business history.
5. Module 5 — The 1920s Boom and 1929 Crash: Market speculation, regulatory gaps, and the human consequences of economic collapse.
6. Module 6 — Legacy & Interpretation: Long-term impacts, memory, and how historians narrate entrepreneurial success/failure.

Assessment & Certification

Assessment includes module quizzes, a primary-source analysis paper (2,000–3,000 words), and a final capstone project in which you prepare a portrait-based case study. Successful completion awards a course certificate and a digital badge suitable for LinkedIn.

Instructor

Led by a historian with expertise in Canadian economic and visual culture, the instructor combines archival training with public-history practice to make archival materials accessible and analytically useful.

Why This Course Matters

By focusing on portraits and entrepreneurs, this course offers a fresh lens on Canadian economic development: one that humanizes large structural changes and trains you in archival interpretation and narrative construction — skills valuable in research, curation, education, and policy analysis.

Explore These Valuable Resources.

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Fur Trade (overview)
• Library and Archives Canada — Research Guides
• History.com — Stock Market Crash of 1929

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Call to Action

Enroll now to master the stories behind Canada’s business leaders and learn archival methods that bring their portraits and papers to life. Register today to get immediate access to lectures, downloadable readings, and archival image galleries.