Rupert's Land Research Articles

Assembling Sovereignty: Canadian Claims to the Athabasca District Prior to Treaty No. 8

ABSTRACT Recent Canadian legal scholarship has emphasised the centrality of treaties between the colonial state and First Nations in the assertion of Canadian sovereignty over Indigenous lands. Historical interpretations, meanwhile, would suggest that sovereignty, rather than asserted, is assembled over time. Historically, sovereignty is understood to be contingent and layered; it is assembled through a series of ‘detours, improvisations and tinkering.’ This paper looks at the historical circumstances of Canadian sovereignty in the Athabasca district prior to the making of Treaty No. 8 with the First Nations. British sovereignty claims to Rupert's Land and the Northwestern Territories (including the area that came to be known as the Athabasca district), were assembled through the practices and activities of the Hudson's Bay Company. These claims were transferred to Canada in 1869 and Canada hesitantly and quietly took measures to further assemble and express its sovereignty in these lands. Canada surveyed and inventoried the Athabasca district's resources, commenced exploratory work on petroleum resources, provided relief from famine, financially supported schools for Indigenous children, and established and enforced a system of law. By the time Treaty No. 8 was negotiated in 1899, Canada had thus taken a series of steps to assemble and express its sovereignty in the district. Rather than establishing, asserting or legitimating Canadian sovereignty, Treaty No. 8 may be better understood as another measure in the process of assembling it.

The Nor’-Wester and the Saskatchewan Gold Rush

ABSTRACTThis article explores the phenomenon of how news about the discovery of gold on the North Saskatchewan River in British administrated Rupert's Land was propagated by the press in the early 1860s. It tracks the resonance of gold rush news first in the Nor’-Wester, a newspaper published in the Red River Settlement, and then reveals how this paper's coverage was re-published and transmitted across the Anglophone world. The article shows how news about the Saskatchewan gold rush was highly politicised. In the Red River Settlement, editors of the Nor’-Wester sought to spur on the British parliament to implement responsible government in the colony, issuing dire warnings about the potential repercussions of a mass migration to the region and the need to act precipitously. Likewise, in newspapers across North America, editors republished and endorsed news from the Nor’-Wester about the Saskatchewan gold fields to benefit their own communities. But while editors championed the Saskatchewan gold fields to lure potential gold rushers to the region, no large-scale migration to the Northwest occurred. While news about the Saskatchewan gold fields may have been popular across the Anglophone world, it was not actionable. While news reports conveyed the impression that a gold rush was ongoing on the North Saskatchewan River, the reality on the ground did not match the press coverage.

Humanities

Humanities

"The Pest:" The Rev. James Settee and the Church Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century Rupert's Land - A Case Study of Native Church Policy and Indigenous Missionary

"The Pest:" The Rev. James Settee and the Church Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century Rupert's Land - A Case Study of Native Church Policy and Indigenous Missionary

Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert's Land. By A.A. den Otter. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012. xxxiv + 438 pp. Maps, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $49.95.

Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert's Land. By A.A. den Otter. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012. xxxiv + 438 pp. Maps, abbreviations, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $49.95.

Civilizing the wilderness: culture and nature in pre-confederation Canada and Rupert's Land

Civilizing the wilderness: culture and nature in pre-confederation Canada and Rupert's Land

An Alaskan Perspective

My perspective on the Arctic is that of a Brit who has become an Alaskan: I am a Scot who grew up in England, where I earned my bachelor of science degree and a doctorate from the University of Essex. My first academic appointment was at the University of Ghana in West Africa and I have been on the faculty of the University of Alaska Anchorage, where I have specialized in comparative politics and international relations, for more than 30 years. I became interested in Arctic issues upon my arrival in Alaska and was the founding director of the Canadian studies program. Like many of my British compatriots, I grew up with broad global interests and an awareness of Britain's heritage of exploration, discovery, and colonization, including significant contributions to polar exploration both north and south.Educated in the UK, I had learned about British Antarctic and Arctic explorations and the role of the Hudson's Bay Company in exploring the remote regions of North America. I knew more about Canada than about the United States from my high school studies of North America, so I was amazed to discover on my arrival in Alaska in 1974 that there was very little knowledge or understanding of Canada in Alaska, and virtuaUy no communication between Alaska and the adjacent areas of Canada, British Columbia and the Yukon. Despite Alaska being a virtual exclave of the US, cut off from the contiguous states by Canada, there were no courses on Canada in the elementary or high school curriculums in Alaska, nor any at the campuses of the University of Alaska until the Canadian studies program was established at its Anchorage campus in 1986.The prevauing attitude towards Canada on the part of the informed public in Alaska could best be characterized as one of generalized suspicion, although I should hasten to add that that would also have been true for Alaskan attitudes towards most other foreign countries during the Cold War period. And indeed, Alaskans even had suspicions of their own federal government and of Americans outside Alaska.US-CANADA ARCTIC RELATIONS ATTHE OUTSETThe history of the relationship between Canada and the US as Arctic neighbours begins in 1867 with the US purchase of Alaska from the Russians, an act that is often regarded as one of the precipitating factors of Canadian confederation.1 In purchasing Alaska, the US gained territory in the north that extended into the Arctic; confederation created Canada out of what were formerly British colonies and Hudson's Bay Company territory (Rupert's Land) in the north and far north of North America. Thus the US and Canada became neighbours in the Arctic in 1867 at the border between Alaska and what later became the Yukon territory and the province of British Columbia.Relations between the remaining British in North America (largely in Canada) and the Americans had been tense after the U S won its independence: borders were not demarcated and there were regular skirmishes before and after the War of 1812 when the British burned the White House. The report that the British had traveUed right across the continent from Trois-Rivieres to the Arctic and Pacific oceans spurred President Thomas Jefferson to dispatch the corps of discovery under the leadership of captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to make good American possession of the continent after the Louisiana purchase. And the 1823 Monroe doctrine, which pronounced that henceforth the western hemisphere was not open to European intervention, was partly aimed at getting rid of the British from the Oregon territory. There was a definite feeling in the US at the time of the purchase that owning Alaska would facilitate America's acquisition of the rest of what is now western Canada, which was seen as a natural development in accordance with the US conception of manifest destiny.The original border between Russia, in possession of Alaska, and Great Britain, in possession of Canada, had been demarcated in 1825 but emanated from a series of treaty negotiations to end the Napoleonic Wars in which the US government had been deeply involved. …

A Company with Sovereignty and Subjects of Its Own? The Case of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670–1763

AbstractQuestions about the ways in which colonial subjects were acquired and maintained, and how it was that multiple and often contradictory sovereignties came to overlap in history, may not be purely academic. We raise them today because they spring from issues that remain unresolved, concerning rights to land, resources, and self-determination. Following recent scholarship on the English East India Company, the author redefines the Hudson's Bay Company, during the period before widespread settler colonialism, as a state (or “company-state”), and in this way argues that the HBC-state possessed its own kind of sovereignty. The article make three main arguments: that it was up to the HBC, not the Crown, to found Rupert's Land, defend its establishments, make alliances with locals, and challenge intruders; that HBC rule extended to cover not only the company's employees but, eventually, an indigenous “home guard” population; and that the HBC welfare regime transformed the relationship between ruler and ruled.

Letters from Rupert's Land, 1826-1840: James Hargrave of the Hudson's Bay Company

Letters from Rupert's Land, 1826-1840: James Hargrave of the Hudson's Bay Company

Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives (review)

Reviewed by: Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives George Colpitts (bio) Deidre Simmons . Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives. McGill-Queen's University Press. xvi, 360. $80.00 Deirdre Simmons's Keepers of the Record sheds light on the history of the Hudson's Bay Company's nearly three thousand linear metres of archival holdings that span some three hundred years. She provides 'an account of how the Company kept its records' and an engaging 'history of the people who were responsible for making and keeping those records.' A convergence of business practices at the time of the company's founding in 1670 and support for 'intellectual and experimental endeavours' in the England of Charles II helped begin the company's long tradition in detailed record-keeping. But so did the company's reliance on precarious charter rights and its vulnerability to foreign and domestic merchant competition. Almost from its beginning, London committees insisted that employees keep records that could defend their shareholders' rights in court or help the business compete against commercial interlopers in North America. But Simmons's history, too, presents the company's 'voluntary' actions that fortuitously prompted its staff to squirrel away many of its now cherished vellum books, account ledgers, and letters sent between Hudson Bay and London that might otherwise have been trashed. Simmons's accounting, then, highlights both the context and the personalities of importance. They range from the overworked bayside scriveners to the imposing directors, all of whom contributed to the remarkable 'provenance and original order' of the company record. Noteworthy individuals include the late-eighteenth-century governor Samuel Wegg, whose pushing of the company's affairs inland from Hudson Bay necessitated careful mapping and new orders of record-keeping; Andrew Wedderburn, the committeeman reforming business and accounting practices in the critical years of competition; and, of course, George Simpson, whose dominance over the company coincided with its nineteenth-century trade monopoly over a vast extent of North America. Simmons has well-managed the difficult task of assembling this history. She traces largely forgotten paper trails that in some cases [End Page 565] take on a life of their own. These include the interplay of interests joining Radisson and Des Grosseillier with the company's first shareholders. There were the intrigues of Arthur Dobbs, who, in his bid to undermine the company's monopoly in the mid-eighteenth century, seems to have thieved some of the company's critical documents, including the important Kelsey papers. Most welcome above all, however, are Simmons's histories of secretaries, warehousemen, and clerks, many the 'blue-coats' drawn from charity schools, whether Christ's Hospital or the Grey Coat School, who found service in North America. Even there, the quality of their accounting and 'flourish' of their handwriting did not escape the scrutiny of the London Committee. Simmons then follows the history beyond the Transfer of Rupert's Land in 1870 and the new shuffle of papers in an era of land sales and shopkeeping within the new dominion. There is a consistent theme connecting the fur trade and modern eras: inevitably, tension mounted as the company's secretive record-keeping traditions ended up preserving documents of ever-greater historical value. In the 1920s, directors nearing their company's 250th anniversary became more conscious of the importance of its records to Canada and its historians. Steps were taken in the interwar period to formally establish a company archive with better organized documents, and, in 1938, make more accessible some of the journals and correspondence in publications of the Hudson's Bay Record Society. In 1950, the company supported the ambitious project to microfilm many pre-1870 records, a boon to Canadian researchers. Finally, momentum growing in the late 1960s to move the company's archives to Canada led to talks between the company and the British and Canadian governments. Eventually, the move took place in 1974, when six twenty-ton containers were dispatched from England - the records divided up between two ships as a safeguard in the event of shipwreck. Their placement in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is rightfully underlined for its importance in...

The Accuracy and Use of Sextants and Watches in Rupert's Land in the 1790s

Summary The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the sextants and watches employed at the end of the eighteenth century in surveying Rupert's Land, the vast territory of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and to discuss their usage and accuracy. The results provide information on the standards of manufacture at the time, on the reliability of the contemporary latitude and longitude of various fur-trading posts, and on the careers of the surveyors themselves. The sextant readings are shown to have a standard deviation of about 20 arcseconds when used in a vertical position to find altitudes of the Sun and stars, and about 40 arcseconds otherwise, for finding lunar distances. Because of the use of artificial horizons, these conclusions imply that, at a 95% (2σ) confidence level, a single determination of latitude is reliable to ±20 arcseconds (600 m on the Earth's surface), of longitude ±20 arcminutes (approximately 60 km in Rupert's Land), and a single determination of local apparent time is reliable to ±3 s. The watches, it appears, could run at a steady rate with errors of less than a minute for a period of a week or two.

Canada and the British world: culture, migration, and identity

Introduction / Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis 1. Information Wanted: Women Emigrants in a Transatlantic World / Elizabeth Jane Errington 2. Self-Reflection in the Consolidation of Scottish Identity: A Case Study in Family Correspondence, 1805-50 / Sarah Katherine Gibson 3. Entering the Christian World: Indigenous Missionaries in Rupert's Land / A.A. den Otter 4. Law and British Culture in the Creation of British North America / David Murray 5. New Brunswick Women Travellers and the British Connection, 1845-1905 / Gail G. Campbell 6. Our Glorious Anglo-Saxon Race Shall Ever Fill Earth's Highest Place: The Anglo-Saxon and the Construction of Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canada / Paula Hastings 7. Canada's Boys -- An Imperial or National Asset? Response to Baden-Powell's Boy Scout Movement in Pre-War Canada / Patricia Dirks 8. Part of the British Empire Too: French Canada and Colonization Propaganda / Serge Courville 9. Competing Visions: Canada, Britain, and the Writing of the First World War / Wesley C. Gustavson 10. Claiming Cavell: and Memoralization / Katie Pickles 11. Scrutinizing the Submerged Tenth: Salvation Army Immigrants and their Reception in Canada / Myra Rutherdale 12. Enigmas in Hebridean Emigration: Crofter Colonists in Western Canada / Marjory Harper 13. Nation-Building in Saskatchewan: Teachers from the British Isles in Saskatchewan Rural Schools in the 1920s / Marilyn Barber 14. Brushes, Budgets and Butter: Canadian Culture and Identity at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924-25 / Christopher Tait 15. Instructor to Empire: Canada and the Rhodes Scholarships, 1902-39 / David E. Torrance 16. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission in the 1930s: How Canada's First Public Broadcaster Negotiated Britishness / Mary Vipond 17. Canadian Labour Politics and the British Model, 1920-50 / James Naylor 18. Historical Perspective on Britain: The Ideas of Canadian Historians Frank H. Underhill and Arthur R.M. Lower / R. Douglas Francis 19. The Monarchy, the Mounties, and Ye Olde English Fayre: Identity at All Saints' Anglican, Edmonton (1875-1990s) / Frances Swyripa Contributors Index

Humboldt and the Habitability of Canada's Great Northwest*

ABSTRACT. Alexander von Humboldt's influence in British North America during the nineteenth century was filtered mainly through British imperial applications of “Humboldtian” sciences, including geomagnetism and biogeography. The best‐known examples include Edward Sabine and John Henry Lefroy, Royal Artillery officers who, during the 1830s and 1840s, transformed British North American outposts and territories, including Rupert's Land, into Humboldtian sites and regions in Great Britain's imperial “magnetic crusade.” Important groundwork had already been laid by John Richardson, who applied data accrued during John Franklin's overland Arctic expeditions during the 1820s to systematize Humboldtian inquiries into the habitability of Canada's Great Northwest. Despite both the relative decline of Humboldtian sciences by midcentury and Humboldt's own reservations about the political ramifications of his science, his “cosmic” outlook circulated in Canada to refine territorial expansionists' scientistic arguments justifying annexation of Rupert's Land after the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company expired in 1869.

My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804, and: From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839 (review)

Reviewed by: My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804 George Nelson, and: From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839 Gerhard J. Ens My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804 George Nelson. Edited by Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck. Rupert's Land Record Society Series. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 240, illus. $44.95 From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839. Edited by William Barr. Rupert's Land Record Society Series. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv, 336, illus. $49.95 The fur trade is back - well, fur-trade documentary publishing is making a comeback at any rate. In the 'golden age' of writing about the fur trade (prior to the 1950s), when fur traders like La Vérendrye, Samuel Hearne, Alexander MacKenzie, and David Thompson were deemed to be critical figures in the mythology of Canadian nation-building, fur-trade documentary volumes were published yearly by the Champlain Society and the Hudson Bay Record Society. Since the late 1960s and the 1970s, however, as fur-trade scholars moved away from imperial themes and a [End Page 546] preoccupation with Euro-American dimensions of that history to focus on Aboriginal roles and the socio-cultural aspects of the trade, fur-trade documentary publishing declined precipitously. In part, this was due to a growing scepticism about the uncritical use of published primary documents as a window on objective truth, but also because most published fur-trade documents contained little about Native history. By the 1980s the Hudson Bay Record Society was defunct. The pendulum of scholarly interest has begun to swing back. The current fascination with colonialism/post-colonialism and the deconstruction of colonial systems of representation has produced a renewed attention to fur-trade texts. In order to 'read beyond the words' we still need texts to analyse and read beyond. In the last half-dozen years there has been a plethora of fur-trade texts rolling off the presses with more in the planning and editing stages. The two books under review here are part of these trends and are published by the Rupert's Land Record Society and McGill-Queen's University Press, a more than welcome successor to the Hudson's Bay Record Society. My First Years in the Fur Trade, the fur-trade journals of George Nelson between 1802 and 1804, is an excellent addition to the fur-trade library. Nelson was not only an astute observer of the fur trade and Native life, but he left behind two separate accounts of this period in his life. The original 1802-4 journals of Nelson's first years in the fur trade in the Folle Avoine District (south of Lake Superior) have not survived, but Nelson rewrote these journals in 1811 while he was stationed on Lake Winnipeg and sent them to his father in Lower Canada. Twenty-five years later, following a chance meeting with a former fur-trade colleague, Nelson went over the same events again when he wrote a series of lengthy memoirs. What the editors have done here is reproduce the 1802-4 journal written in 1811, including excerpts of the later 1836 memoir where it comments on and supplements the description of events in the journal. These documents offer the reader a rare stereoscopic view of not only Nelson's apprenticeship in the fur trade as a fifteen-year-old, but of the ways in which self-censorship and the play of memory could affect the depiction of events in fur-trade documents. The journal written for his father in 1811 varies in significant ways from his later memoir, particularly his account of his first marriage to an Ojibwa woman. On the whole, Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck have done an excellent job in editing and annotating these writings. The introduction both contextualizes Nelson's life and writings, and provides just enough background to the fur trade at the turn of the nineteenth century to allow the uninitiated to make sense of these documents. The brief...

Introduction: No Catlin Without Kane; or, Really Understanding the “American” West

Let me begin by invoking three moments from the history of the North American West. The first occurred in late 1801; the second, in 1842 or early 1843; the third took place in 1881. Together, these three moments set the stage for this volume of essays, an attempt probe the commingling of Canada's West with that of the United States West in history, image, and myth, adapt the phrasing of Henry Nash Smith's subtitle in Virgin Land (1950). Any story, any history, is a combination of verifiable fact, descriptive image, and believed (or disbelieved) mythology, and nowhere has this been more evident that in the North American West it explored, settled, and understood from the sixteenth century the present. Three moments. John L. Allen, author of the excellent Passage Through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (1975), has also written of Thomas Jefferson's reaction the publication, in London, of Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, through the Continent of North the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793 (1801). He says that late in 1801 the President was worried because the publication of Mackenzie's book stirred the imagination of the Western world and jolted Jefferson's thinking on the geography of the western interior of North America (79). As a consequence, Jefferson ordered his own copy of the book from Philadelphia, he began poring his collection of books and maps on western North and he told his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to begin making preparations for an American exploration the Pacific. More than this, Jefferson also informed the Spanish, British, and French ministers the United States of his intentions send Lewis west, as he put it, 'unite the discoveries' of the explorers of Rupert's Land with those of an American party farther south (80). That's just what Lewis and Clark eventually did--unite the versions of the geographical reality of the North American West then understood in Europe, in British North America, and in the United States. This is a first moment. The second occurred sometime over the winter of 1842-43 in London where Paul Kane, who there after studying art in Italy, met George Catlin and Catlin's art on display in Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. The American then basking in the fame that his for a short time, a notoriety fueled by his best-selling book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians that had been published in 1841 (see Dippie et al). Kane, inspired by this meeting and by Catlin's images, decided embark on a similar project in Canada. He returned there and made an initial summer sketching trip the northern Great Lakes country in 1845 before securing the support of the Hudson's Bay Company for his transcontinental trip, 1846-48. As J. Russell Harper explains, Sir George Simpson--Inland Governor of the Company--wrote a circular letter all Hudson's Bay Company officers in 'Ruperts Land and Elswehere,' directing that the artist be given free transportation of company boats and 'hospitalities' at all posts. Kane, a guest of the Hudson's Bay Company, could go without cost anywhere in the vast territories it controlled (Qtd. in MacLaren, I Came, 11). It a wonderful deal. Kane, in fact, arrived on the Pacific coast in the same HBC brigade that brought the official news of the Oregon Treaty (1846). That is, he there just vast changes were afoot. The third moment is a brief one, barely mentioned in the biographical accounts of North America's most-famous Western painter, Frederic Remington. In 1881, Remington made his first trip west Montana, the trip from which he sent back--drawn on a piece of wrapping paper--his first illustration appear in Harper's Weekly (in February 1882). During that trip he crossed the Canada-U.S. border on horseback and there, according one commentator, saw his first Mounted Police--bringing in a Blackfoot suspected of murder. …

Creating Order in the Wilderness: Transplanting the English Law to Rupert's Land, 1835–51

The legal history of the western Canadian frontier has received renewed attention in recent years. Much of the work readdresses the question of “law and order,” challenging older assumptions about Canada's orderly frontier culture—orderly particularly in contrast to the United States’ violent settlement of the west. At issue is not just a revision of whether violence occurred on the Canadian frontier but a fundamental reinterpretation of what the concepts of “law” and “order” had really meant. Indeed, conflict between legal cultures has become a major theme as historians attempt to rewrite the history of the Canadian west. They understand that this conflict—whether violent or not—shaped the formation of Canada's legal culture before 1870. Methodological prescriptions for writing this type of history have emphasized the need for historians to widen their base of sources, particularly to exploit “nonlegal” sources (such as diaries, journals, and letters), and to consider the workings of what Lawrence Friedman has called the “cultural” component of a legal system: what suits were brought to court, what notions came into play there, what expectations people brought with them. Important studies on the colonial settlement of British Columbia in the nineteenth century have focused on the relationships between the Hudson's Bay Company, colonists, and Natives to demonstrate that conflict over resources and competing definitions of liberalism and law often shaped legal discourse. These rich accounts have, among other things, called into question the idea of an orderly, peaceful Canadian frontier. They have also provided a much more complex picture of the interactions between Native and European, and the uses of law and the legal system by settlers, Company men, and Aboriginals.

Classical codes: biogeographical assessments of environment in Victorian Canada

This paper offers a case study of the historical role of ideas in changing perceptions of place during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon Rupert's Land in British North America, highlighting Victorian scientific assessments of landscape and environment. In addition to Humboldtian influences that shaped geographical sciences, the persistence of a more deeply rooted context warrants scrutiny. Adherents of Victorian culture greatly valued its Graeco-Roman heritage, whose tripartite impact upon the history of Rupert's Land is explored here. This classical tradition transmitted crucial practical lessons: through Euclidean geometry, in defining new physical spaces; through dualistic Hyperborean myths, in formulating (sometimes contradictory) expectations of these lands; and, through a Lucretian revival, in confronting some increasing uncertainties in late Victorian science. The evidence suggests that aspects of these classical influences held similar sway in Victorian cultures elsewhere, warranting closer examinations of their details in different historical/geographical contexts.

Understanding Work Historically: A Reflection Prompted by Two Recent Studies of the Fur Trade

THE FUR TRADE long occupied pride of place in the writing of Canadian history. For a generation Harold Innis's assertion, that the fur trade explains why Canada exists as a country, stood largely unquestioned. In the mid-1970s, this began to change as support grew for Stanley Ryerson's conflicting argument that industrialization preceded Confederation. Then, for more than a decade, labour, social, and women's history flourished as historians focused on the transformation of Canada in the 19th century. No new disciplinary consensus emerged, however, and in recent years the gap between historians interested in these newer approaches and those who defend the liberal values of an older, largely political, historical narrative has developed into an open rift. So, in their radically different readings of the fur trade, these two new books do not represent a renewed interest in an older field as much as they symbolize the politically contested terrain that is Canadian history. Edith Burley's path-breaking study merits the Macdonafd Prize. Servants of the Honourable Company is a stimulating and richly textured application of lessons learned in two decades of labour history. Her subject is the people who worked under contract as long-term employees of the Hudson's Bay Company when it actively exploited the interior of Rupert's Land. Her historical argument is that changes in the Company's operations can be explained largely in terms of repeated attempts to resolve the twin problems of labour recruitment and work discipline.

Book reviews

Book reviews

Book reviews

Book reviews