CEA Fellow: Angela Redish

Angela Redish is an economic historian who has worked on the comparative history of the US and Canadian banking systems, and on the origin of the gold standard.

Angela’s early research (often in collaboration with Michael Bordo) examined the rationale for creating the Bank of Canada and the operation of the Canadian banking system prior to the establishment of the central bank. She co-authored (with Michael and Hugh Rockoff) a series of paper analyzing the roots of the relative (to the US) stability of the Canadian banking system (Journal of Economic History 1994, Economic History Review, 2015). In other work, she wrote a series of papers examining the evolution of the gold standard, examining how and why bimetallic standards operated in many Western economies for several centuries and the role of technology in the shift from bimetallic standards to the gold standard to the fiat money world of today. This research was published in economic history journals and book chapters, and in her monograph “Bimetallism: An economic and historical analysis” published with Cambridge in 2000.

More recently Angela’s research has focused on the history of Indigenous economies, beginning with her 2019 Presidential address “Treaty of Paris vs. Treaty of Niagara: Rethinking Canadian economic history in the 21st century” in which she argued for the importance of including the history of Indigenous economies and resource loss, particularly in the teaching of Canadian economic history. Subsequent papers have focused on land dispossession of US Indigenous nations (Journal of Economic History, 2022), the early 20th century decline in the wealth of Indigenous nations in the US (AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2024) and a comparison of the role of Indigenous agency in interactions with early chartered companies in Hudson Bay and the Cape of Good Hope (Economic History Review, 2024).

Angela spent her academic career at the University of British Columbia. Her interests in how economic history can serve the needs of policy makers was reflected in a year spent as Special Advisor at the Bank of Canada. Angela also devoted considerable time serving the academic community in administrative roles, first as Head of the Economics Department at UBC, then as Senior Advisor to UBC President Stephen Toope and also as Vice Provost, and Provost pro-term at UBC from 2012 to 2017. Working with David Green she also supported the transition of UBC’s Economics Department to the Vancouver School of Economics. Angela also served as president of the Canadian Economics Association during 2018-19.