Abstract
In 1857 the Select Committee on the Hudson’s Bay Company [SCHBC] met in London. In many ways, this committee was much like the other boards of inquiry that investigated colonial governance around the nineteenth-century British Empire. It sat for over 40 days, heard testimony from more than 20 witnesses, and produced a weighty tome of a report. All this was undertaken with the goal of evaluating 200 years of the specific sort of colonial governance exercised by a private fur-trade enterprise, the Hudson’s Bay Company [HBC] over the North American territory spanning between the Great Lakes to the east, the Pacific Coast to the west, the Arctic to the North and a ragged, moving, and not entirely fixed or understood line separating American from British territory to the south.
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Notes
E. Mancke (2005) ‘Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World’, in E. Mancke and C. Shammas (eds), The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 238.
Also see P. Girard (2014), ‘Imperial Legacies: Chartered Enterprises in Northern British America’, in S. Dorsett and J. McLaren (eds), Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements, and Legacies (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
G. Williams (1970) ‘The Hudson’s Bay Company and its Critics in the Eighteenth-Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5 (20), pp. 149–71.
Great Britain (1837) Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, (British Settlements) (London: Aborigines Protection Society), p. 3. On this, see E. Elbourne (2003), ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates Over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4 (3);
M. D. Blackstock (2000) ‘The Aborigines Report (1837): A Case Study in the Slow Change of Colonial Social Relations’, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, XX (1), pp. 67–94.
Great Britain (1857) Report from the Select Committee on The Hudson’s Bay Company; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (London: House of Commons), p. iii.
See, on the inquiry, A. A. den Otter (1999), ‘The 1857 Parliamentary Inquiry, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Rupert’s Land Aboriginal People’, Prairie Forum, 24 (2), pp. 143–69;
D. Owram (1992), The Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856–1900, 2nd edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
J. S. Galbriaith (1957) The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor: 1821–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 341.
See B. Cooper (1988) Alexander Kennedy Isbister: A Respectable Critic of the Honourable Company (Ottawa: Carleton University Press), Chapters 1 and 2.
See, for instance, C. Morgan (2008) ‘Creating Interracial Intimacies: British North America, Canada, and the Transatlantic World, 1830–1914’, Historical Journal of the Canadian Association, 19 (2), pp. 75–104;
C. Thrush (2014), ‘The Iceberg and the Cathedral: Encounter, Entanglement, and Isuma in Inuit London’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (1), pp. 59–79.
A. McClintock (1990), Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge), Introduction.
See, recently, N. St-Onge, C. Podruchny and B. Macdougall (eds) (2010), Contours of a People: Métis Family, Mobility, and History (Vancouver: UBC Press: 2010);
B. Macdougall (2009), One of the Family: Métis Culture in Nineteenth-century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: UBC Press);
H. Devine (2005), The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1660–1900 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press).
See, for instance, N. Blackhawk (2006), Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press);
G. H. Whaley (2010), Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: US Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
D. I. Selesa (2011) Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
See S. Royle (2011), Company, Crown, and Colony: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Territorial Endeavour in Western Canada (London: Macmillan).
W. L. Morton, quoted in G. Friesen (1987), The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 117.
Aborigines Protection Society (1870) The Red River Insurrection: Three Letters and A Narrative of Events (London: the Aborigines’ Protection Society), p. 2.
See here S. Carter (1999), Aboriginal People and their Colonizers in Western Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
See D. N. Sprague (1988), Canada and the Métis, 1869–1885 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press).
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© 2015 Adele Perry
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Perry, A. (2015). Designing Dispossession: The Select Committee on the Hudson’s Bay Company, Fur-trade Governance, Indigenous Peoples and Settler Possibility. In: Laidlaw, Z., Lester, A. (eds) Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452368_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452368_8
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