“Especially in This Free Country”: Webs of Empire, Slavery, and the Fur Trade

Abstract

Spanning the years from late 1600s and into the early 1800s “‘Especially in This Free Country:’ Webs of Empire, Slavery and the Fur Trade” challenges a historiography that positions what has come to be known as the Canadian fur trade as exceptional in its relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples, where interactions between Indigenous producers and non-Indigenous traders are presented as largely cooperative and peaceful and as rooted in relationships that operated in the absence of coerced or unfree labour. In fact, the fur trade, connected as it was through webs of family/business relationships to the rest of the colonial world was not exceptional. Across northern North America the fur trade world experienced the same sorts of violence, including chattel slavery, as the rest of the empires with which these webs connected. Far from absent, colonial violence was a part of the Canadian fur trade just as it was a part of empire. Located in the pre-history of Canada, this thesis responds to Harvey Amani Whitfield’s observation that, although there have been some excellent studies of slavery in Canada recently, “slavery has not become part of the Canadian national narrative” 1 by arguing that chattel slavery in the fur trade in what would become Canada was linked to the empires it was a part of, pervasive, integrated into all aspects of the fur trade, and occurred across the northern North American continent.