Edward Cavanagh, ‘Fur Trade Colonialism: Traders and Cree at Hudson Bay, 1713-67’, Australasian Canadian Studies 27, 1-2 (2009).

abstract:

Why has the historic Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) been considered a ‘non-colonial company’ by Canadian historians? Surely those inescapably colonial dyads of insiders/outsiders, rulers/subjects, and Europeans/Natives, suggest otherwise; and as such, we should try comparing it to other colonial forms to better understand its historical presence. This paper introduces the concept of fur trade colonialism as something that is separate to settler colonialism. As is well known in the Canadian historiographical canon, guns, germs and geopolitical upheavals characterised the Indian interior in this early period (1713-63); but what about the ‘settlements’ that hugged the Bay itself? These ‘settlements’, I argue, were not only the sites of contact, but the sites of a perpetual colonial encounter – a  shared space in which natives and sojourning HBC men came to live under the slight rule of Bayside governors, who tempered their own moral judgement with the policies laid out by the Company’s London Committee. This paper brings these settlements under the microscope to analyse the means by which – if at all – the ‘home guard’ natives (mostly Cree nation) of the settlements were colonised by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Keywords: Hudson’s Bay Company; fur trade; colonialism; Cree nation.