The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History is a book written by Harold Innis covering the fur trade era in Canada from the early 16th century to the 1920s. First published in 1930, it comprehensively documents the history of fur trading while extending Innis's analysis of the economic and social implications of Canada's reliance on staple products. The book focuses on the far-reaching effects of new techniques and technologies in the contact between European and Indigenous civilizations and shows how co-operation and rivalries among French, English and Indigenous peoples shaped the history of the northern half of North America. Finally, the book tries to show how Canada emerged as a nation with boundaries largely determined by the fur trade. Canada, Innis argues, "emerged not in spite of geography, but because of it."
What follows is a detailed summary of The Fur Trade in Canada with comments, analysis and assessments from scholars who have studied and written about it.
Introduction Harold Innis begins The Fur Trade in Canada with a brief chapter on the beaver which became a much desired fur due to the popularity of the beaver hat in European society. He remarks that it is impossible to understand the developments of the fur trade, or of Canadian history, without some knowledge of the beaver's life and habits.Innis (Fur Trade) p 3. Biographer John Watson notes that Innis was following an analytical approach he had learned during his post-graduate work at the University of Chicago. In such case studies, Innis had been taught it was necessary to understand the nature of a commodity or staple product and to adopt a comprehensive view of it by studying its geography.Watson, Alexander, John. (2006). Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 147. Since First Nations cultures and ways of life are intrinsically tied to landscape, it was their techniques of hunting and preparation, coupled with geography, that essentially determined the development of the fur trade.Innis (Fur Trade) p. 14 The age of the animal and what time of year the beaver was killed were key determinants of the quality of the pelt.
Innis notes that the most valuable beaver fur was to be found north of the St. Lawrence River especially in the forests of the Pre-Cambrian Shield with its abundance of waterways.Innis (1929), pp. 3, 4 He suggests that beaver fur could be carried long distances because the pelt of the average adult weighed less than two pounds. The animal itself was a good source of food.
Innis points out that the beaver "migrates very little and travels over land very slowly." Although adult beavers reproduce prolifically, it takes a young beaver more than two years to mature. These biological characteristics made death in great numbers and local extinction inevitable, especially after Indian hunters acquired European axes that could chop through beaver lodges and dams. European guns, knives and spears also made the slow-moving beaver easy prey.Innis, (Fur Trade) pp. 3–6.
Innis concludes his introduction by noting that as beaver populations were destroyed in eastern areas, traders were forced to push north and west in search of new sources of supply. "The problem of the fur trade," he writes, "became one of organizing the transport of supplies and furs over increasingly greater distances. In this movement, the waterways of the beaver areas were of primary importance and occupied a vital position in the economic development of northern North America."Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 6.
Fur trade history
Harold Innis meticulously traces the fur trade over more than four centuries, from the early 16th century to the 1920s. It is a story filled with military conflict between French and English imperial forces and among warring Indigenous peoples. It is also a tale of shrewd barter and commercial rivalry. Yet Innis, the economic historian, tells the story in 400 pages of dry, Euro-centric and dense prose packed with statistics.Vancouver Public Library. Great Canadian Books of the Century. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, p. 40. The authors note that "Innis was not the most elegant of writers—his prose is often swamped with unnecessary detail."
Innis begins by chronicling the first contacts between European fishing fleets and eastern native tribes in the early 16th century.Innis, (Fur Trade) pp. 9–12. After the founding of the French settlement at Quebec in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, the colony known as New France depended on furs for its economic survival. Champlain joined forces with the Huron Confederacy and its tribal allies against the Iroquois Confederacy in the long struggle to control the fur trade.Moore, Christopher. (1987) "Colonization and Conflict: New France and its Rivals 1600–1760." In The Illustrated History of Canada, edited by Craig Brown. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd., pp 107–115.
As New France grew, French colonists, first known as coureurs de bois and later voyageurs, travelled north and west from Montreal in search of new supplies while their British rivals set up northern trading posts run by the Hudson's Bay Company. The commercial rivalry continued after the British Conquest of New France in 1759, with the establishment of the North West Company by a group of bilingual Scottish Gaelic/English-speaking Montreal merchants who had come to British North America from the Scottish Highlands in the wake of the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden and the incipient Highland Clearances. The two companies built trading posts far west of Lake Superior and Hudson Bay, largely using the Saskatchewan River and its tributaries. The Nor'Westers were more aggressive as they travelled north to the Arctic Ocean via the Mackenzie River and west to the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River. The fierce competition ended in 1821 with the amalgamation of the companies into a Hudson's Bay Company monopoly. The Company finally surrendered its northwestern empire when its royal charter was cancelled in 1869 due to low profits and demand for furs, with its land being transferred to Canada.Innis, (Fur Trade) pp. 43–338.
Innis rounds out the story by documenting the decline of the fur trade monopoly as silk hats and fancier fox fur displaced beaver. The coming of steamboats to the West and the building of railways brought increasing competition from independent traders and new companies from the American West as well as firms from Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver. Improved transportation also brought increased control of the trade and cheaper goods. Increased control led to more inspections, better accounting, conservative policies, decreased aggression, and expansion of districts. Problems that arose included the difficulty in monitoring large districts and policies that were sometimes too rigid. The increase in agriculture also brought competition through decreased reliance on game for food.Innis (Fur Trade) pp. 320–365 Innis ends by noting that in 1927 the Hudson's Bay Company announced it had invested in two fox farms in Prince Edward Island, making the outlook for the trade in wild fur increasingly uncertain. "The time would appear to have arrived," Innis writes, "for a competent survey of the problems of the trade looking to the conservation of one of Canada's important natural resources."Innis, (Fur Trade) pp. 341–379. The quotation appears on p. 379. Indeed, in the end there was an abundance of goods and a lack of furs, suggesting the trade was no longer a major part of the economy.Innis (Fur Trade) pp. 373–4
Furs, culture, and technology
Innis's account of the fur trade as "the history of contact between two civilizations, the European and the North American," focuses on the radical effects of new techniques and technologies.Innis, pp. 388–389. The trade became important in the late 16th century when the beaver hat, a new style of waterproof headgear, became popular among well-dressed European gentlemen.Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 12. Innis stresses, however, that the trade was propelled by native people's intense demand for European manufactured goods:
The importance of iron to a culture dependent on bone, wood, bark and stone can only be suggested. The cumbersome method of cooking in wooden vessels with heated stones was displaced by portable kettles. Work could be carried out with greater effectiveness with iron axes and hatchets, and sewing became much less difficult with awls than it had been with bone needles. To the Indians, iron and iron manufactures were of prime importance. The French were the gens du fer.Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 18. Muskets, knives and metal spears also made hunting easier and more efficient, but Innis points out that the convenience of European manufactured goods came at a high price. The native peoples became dependent on European traders for fresh supplies, ammunition and spare parts. More efficient hunting with guns led to the extermination of the beaver and the need to push into new hunting territories in search of more furs. This competition led to outbreaks of fighting. "Wars between tribes which with bows and arrows had not been strenuous," Innis writes, "conducted with guns were disastrous."Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 20. Everything was made worse because native peoples had no immunity to European diseases such as smallpox which continually ravaged their communities, decimating whole populations.Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 21. Finally, European rum, brandy and strong wine brought illness, conflict and addiction.Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 19. Also see, Ray, Arthur. "When Two Worlds Met" in The Illustrated History of Canada, edited by Craig Brown. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, p. 88: "Since alcohol was cheap to obtain, could be consumed on the spot, and was addictive, the European traders had very strong economic incentives to trade and give away large quantities of liquor."
Again and again, Innis draws attention to what he sees as the disastrous and catastrophic effects of the contact between a more technologically advanced European civilization and traditional native societies. He writes that the aboriginal peoples' dependence on the trade in beaver pelts to secure European iron goods "disturbed the balance which had grown up previous to the coming of the European."Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 388. Decades later, Innis would return to this concept of balance in his communications writings.Innis mentions the native peoples specifically in his essay "Industrialism and Cultural Values." In The Bias of Communication. (1951) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 141.
Just as aboriginal peoples depended on imported manufactured goods, European traders relied for their survival on native tools and techniques. Birch-bark canoes enabled traders to travel in spring, summer and fall; snowshoes and toboggans made winter travel possible; while Indian corn, pemmican and wild game provided sustenance and clothing. Equally important, Innis notes, was the natives' thorough knowledge of woodland territories and the habits of the animals they hunted.Innis, (Fur Trade) p. 13.
Biographer John Watson argues that in his study of the fur trade, Innis broke new ground by making cultural factors central to economic development. In Watson's terms, The Fur Trade in Canada is a "complex analysis" of three distinct cultural groups: metropolitan European customers who bought expensive beaver hats, colonial settlers who traded beaver fur for goods from their home countries and indigenous peoples who came to depend on European iron-age technologies.Watson p. 152. Also, Innis notes the dependence of traders on First Nations peoples,Innis (Fur Trade) p. 16 and suggests their dominance in early trading when he writes, "The trade in furs was stimulated by French traders who rapidly acquired an intimate knowledge of the Indian's language, customs, and habits of life"