| Summary: | This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement's Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg's contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Commonwealth in Manitoba ...
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