Max Aitken in Montreal: Financial Innovation and Creative Destruction in the Laurier Boom

The Ontario-born, New Brunswick-raised William Maxwell (Max) Aitken (1879-1964) lived in Montreal for less than three years between 1907 and 1910. He then moved to England where he would become Lord Beaverbrook, the prominent press baron, political fixer and cabinet minister in Churchill’s wartime government. But during his time in Montreal, the author notes, Aitken was a gale of creative destruction, destroying existing ways of doing financial business and replacing well-worn institutions and the people who ran them with a younger generation of investment bankers. Like Aitken, the author explains, Aitken’s men were ambitious Maritimers who moved to Montreal to fulfil their ambitions. Aitken ran his Montreal businesses and directed his young associates for years after he departed the scene. These individuals, under Aitken’s direction and subsequently in their own right, came to dominate the financial scene in Montreal, a legacy that shaped Montreal as the financial capital of Canada until it began to lose that position to Toronto in the 1970s.

June 20, 2019

Crisis and Transformation: the Square Mile in the Early Twentieth Century

Crossing Boundaries and Constructing Linkages : The History of Montreal's Golden Square Mile in National and International Context

McGill University, Montreal

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