Made in Canada?

In July 1907 an 18-year-old Frenchman travelled as a saloon-class passenger on the SS Virginian from Liverpool to Quebec City, then took the CPR westward. On assignment as a sales agent for his family’s cognac firm, he was heading to Winnipeg, home of the Canadian headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Given HBC’s sizeable bulk purchases of high-quality French brandy, Winnipeg would serve as a recurring destination in the young man’s peripatetic existence over the next seven years.

Jean Monnet was already fluent in English thanks to a two-year apprenticeship in London and reacted to his new surroundings with fascination. From his rooms in Winnipeg’s Royal Alexandra Hotel, he marvelled at the disembarking trainloads of immigrants. “They were not refugees: they were not starving,” he noted in his memoirs. “They had come to hard, rewarding work—the conquest of new lands.“ Just...