the history of the hudson's bay company is insane, i did not realize canada was under semifeudal rulership by a scottish fur trading enterprise for like... 200 years
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Longer than that. It started in 1670 and While the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) is famous for its role in the fur trade and the colonization of Canada, it's also got a really dark history of atrocities.
Even wilder (if I'm remember my Grade 10 Social Studies class correctly) is that a big part of the decline of the HBC, and the eventual independence of Canada, is because of the invention of felted wool for waterproof hats.
anyway i started out reading about polar exploration and the HBC comes up *a lot* in the Northwest Passage search. esp john franklin's FIRST total disaster of an expedition in 1819
Just to be clear, "we" British imperialists, invaded and tried to exterminate all of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people of this land. That is not a good thing. I wasn't taught any of that in school and we all should be taught about our history.
When you're finished with this book, consider THE RIVER THAT MADE SEATTLE. HBC plays a role in the colonization of the area that is now Seattle-Tacoma.
Alexander Mackenzie, working for the North West Company (a rival to the HBC that eventually merged with it) reached the Pacific coast in 1793, before Lewis and Clark did it in 1805.
Wait, a woman on the internet didn’t know a thing? Why wasn’t I alerted to this earlier, so I could hold forth and dispel her ignorance? [Hastily Googles “Hudson Bay Company”]
It doesn't make you seem dumb at all. I very much should have known this and didn't either, at least not to the extent you're mentioning. No one knows everything 😂
So many of our problems are because people won’t admit what they don’t know and just storm ahead. There is so much we do not know and that’s ok, if we open our ears, eyes, minds and hearts.
This right here is why some of us obsessively scroll all day long! It's not just that we want to remain in-the- know about what's actually happening on any given day, it's that we find ourselves curious about the things we imagine that we don't yet know.
It's a good trait. Embrace it!
Hello? Is this the internet? I live in the middle of Hudson Bay.
This little community, like most in Nunavut, has a tiny remnant of the HBC: an outlet of The Northern Store. Pictured here in a season currently unavailable at this location.
This is not a dig at you, but most Americans know exactly nothing about Canada so you not having the specific details of The Bay isn't even a small deal. It's no deal!
I want to co-sign this. I had heard of the company at some vague point in the past, but a simple Google search told me that I knew basically nothing about Canada's history before ~1960.
Idk even if I “knew” it, I’m only kind of dimly aware of it from living close enough to Canada to get TVO. You’re the one who’s reading the book! Get your lifelong learn on!
this was me watching William Dalrymple's video lectures about the East India Company. like I generally knew it was bad but holy shit I didn't know HOW bad it was
taking grain from households at bayonet point in the middle of famine so shareholders could get a fat bonus that year and when mass starvation leads to riots massacre the rioters and make the survivors literally lick up the blood of the slain
—somehow not even the most evil fucks in history
Just wait until you learn about John McLoughlin & his family - his son John Jr. was a witness to the 1830s revolution in Paris, was later murdered in Alaska & the HBC's refusal to do anything about it is one reason the border between the US & Canada is not the Columbia River.
His daughter Eloisa was married to an HBC clerk who got way too involved with Mexican/Indigenous revolutionaries in Yerba Buena (rumors were he was supplying arms on the side to undercut Spain & US claim on California).
I'm still very unclear on, for instance, on how the east Indian company went from some trading posts, to more trading posts, to let's invade some stuff, to Queen Victoria is your Empress you have a salt tax hedge now.
the hover-text on that one was lovely: "Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time."
no i love learning this kind of stuff! for example- i was a kid in the 80’s and i only learned recently that apartheid wasn’t from forever ago, like, it wasn’t a colonial system in place for centuries or even decades!
Fuck, coming across a really cool fact or topic that engages your fascination is amazing, and feeling it mesh with your other topics of understanding is like clicking the last puzzle piece into place.
It's a visceral thrill to me, a genuine jab-the-pleasure-center-of-my-brain moment.
I don't think you have to feel that way at all. I don't think most Canadians are really aware of the wildness of the HBC history. I teach it in high school; it could be an entire semester course on its own. Shit, I'm learning things in this thread!
I did know this but you know about so much that I have no clue about which is why I follow you. All you need is curiosity & a desire to learn but there is so much information & only so much time.
I think I have this on my to be read list. I also may be thinking of books that mention them in passing in regards to early united states borders or making building resources for housing.
Learning a [big fact] is genuinely the best feeling though!
Everyone has a different list of them they absolutely don't know because WOW is there a lot of knowledge and the human brain is both incredible and also a smol bean doing its best, y'know?
As an astronomy & cosmology dude, I’m always acutely aware of being made of exploded stars. But you just can’t walk around all day every day barking this at people … 🤷♂️
It definitely depends on where you grew up. Growing up in Minnesota, a lot of our state's founding history is started during the fur trading years by trappers and merchants, so we learned all about it.
There are tons of stuff about other areas of NA that we definitely don't learn about.
Not all, I didn’t know that until I went to a national park site out west and read about it in a visitors center. Learned more about history traveling which makes the attacks on the parks all the more egregious
I was about to reply with a recommendation of Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties. Without indigenous women, the HBC wouldn’t have gotten as powerful as it did.
Great book. In some ways, the HBC in Canada was like the Brit East India Company in India. Colonialism, but the occupying power is not the British state but a corporation.
Great book, finished it last year. Even most Canadians know little about HBC history, unless they live in, like, Manitoba, and it may be covered in a provincial history school unit.
I am so excited for you because the Hudson Bay company is wild. Whenever I tell students stories about the Hudson Bay Company, they always think I’m lying.
idk if he is, but he said “give me a book to read that is about something interesting” and ~most~ of the books i have like that are essentially about racism/injustice and i don’t think he’s ready for some of it yet
Sounds like a very interesting book! Many more people have heard of the East India Company than the Hudson Bay Company. Then there’s the Massachusetts Bay Company, which simply quit pretending to be a corporation and turned itself openly into an independent government.
I grew up in Northern Minnesota, and a bunch of my friends were boy scouts. Up here they dig into voyageur lore as they do a lot of canoeing... so they would spit anytime someone mentioned the HBC. It was pretty funny.
This has been on my mind watching the US descend into corporate oligarch government. All the dumb crap Curtis Yarvin talks about was already tried in various theatres of the British Empire and it just isn't that great.
Like no, having the Yum! Brands Army fight the Kraft Heinz Mercenary Corp for control of the Free Kansas City Entrepot isn't going to Make America Great Again lol
I recall my shock ad a child when I realized the hudson's bay company i was learning about in history was the same as "the Bay" department store i used to go to with my Mom.
Like ALL the trading companies fought wars, it was a wild time. The British, French, and Dutch East Indies Companies waged war with basically anyone they came in contact with, including each other.
South Africa has the largest demographic of Indonesians/Malaysians (referred to as Cape Malays in country) outside of South Asia explicitly because the EIC imported their ancestors as slave labor.
Yes. They were genuinely horrific entities and we should absolutely learn from their resource-driven, expansionist, and imperialist histories and hopefully apply those learnings to mitigate or end current similar horrors wherever we can.
In 1816 hey fought a battle against the rival Northwest Company basically outside my back door. The HBC side were badly outnumbered and the governor of the company was among those killed.
I’m with you. I have Métis ancestry and many ancestors who worked for the NWC & HBC. Just the snippets from the contracts are interesting. I have some copies of traders journals.
I re-found this bit I found in one of my books. This is my 5th great-grandfather. Basically 2 years worth of work in debt to the company when he transferred to HBC.
Same! The records they kept were insane. I looked it up and there’s better records of my great x4 grandpa working for the HBC than there are for all of their children.
I spent a week doing that in 2010 (I think). I had a job during my undergrad as a researcher at the Métis Archival Project and we were there digitizing different things (trading post journals, land grants, scrip applications). I've still got some copies of some of it!
I also spent time at the Saskatchewan archives and the National archives in Ottawa. Plus trips to Frog Lake, Batoche, and Fort Carlton. And the Back to Batoche festival. It was an amazing job.
I hope the archives can be protected! I almost forgot about them (though two of my friends did graduate research there). So glad they've got all those records.
There's an early Chicago novel that looks back on that fur trade feudalism as a kind of northwestern Lost Cause (and the writer was also a Copperhead, so ...). You also see some of it in *First Cow*.
...You see, the whole country was taken over by the Hudson's Bay Company, and was put to work trapping beavers, to be sent to Europe and worn as hats, which was the style at the time...
Yeah, I was reading about this just a few days ago. I had assumed the fur trade was diverse with lynx, mink, bear, raccoon, etc. etc. But no, it seems the demand was primarily for beaver pelts.
The British treated them with mercury and made poison hats out of them. 😂 😂
Right! It's like "And there were the voyageurs, and the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Northwest Company, and they fought over access to territory for the fur trade" and you're sitting there as an eight-year-old with no context to know that this is a completely fucking batshit thing to do!
My mom's family lived in northern BC, and worked for a guy who ran a mink farm -- he used to complain about that company not paying him a decent price.
HBC brings us the notion of settlers trading infected blankets to Indigenous people, a story more well-known than the footnote it comes from.
Poetic justice that the failing corp, under late capitalism, gets wrapped up in the infected blanket of a US private equity firm. Devourer becomes devoured.
I realized this after a vacation to Scotland where I stayed at Glencoe House where the grounds are a legit Newfoundland style arboreal forest because the richest guy in the world was trying to cure his wife's homesickness.
this is (part of) why you always see canadians saying canada isnt a real country its just 3 companies in a trench coat lmaoo like we spent several cumulative months in public school social studiea learning about the bay
The age of mercantilism had a lot of that shit. The British Raj wasn't directly a British State enterprise, it was the East India Company who ruled it. Cyberpunk has a lot of "companies ruling entire cities" but companies used to own whole *countries*.
Now that they're going under I see people saying "We should support this heritage Canadian company!" and I'm like... Why? They were evil, good riddance to them.
People are super into the Bay Company heraldy/colours etc still. Their eponymous department store just filed for bankruptcy [talk about end of an era!] & all products with their flag colours apparently sold out in the sales. Good riddance, honestly.
Canada's like 5 companies in a trench coat that finally decided to federalize in the mid 1800s out of fear of the 'perfidious Irish' Americans, which is a cool flex from my ancestors to make a country.
Interesting...I knew Scotland had some influences in the colonizing era, but I thought it was more by force of fealty than their own institutional interests. Or is the enterprise more adjacent to EIC than home country?
Tl;dr Scottish people seized a lot of the employment opportunities that the various British trading companies offered. Britain's colonial activities worldwide ended up with a disproportionate number of Scots relative to the UK population. Sir Tom Devine has written a lot about this.
Really? That’s like not knowing about the London Company or the Dutch East India Company. Like, literally not knowing about the European hegemonies of the 19th century? How does nobody know history?
Although, I’m 50 and when I was in sixth grade on the Hudson Bay Company was a basic part of early American history in social studies. Obviously shit’s changed.
I have a couple of years on you and we learned it too. But a lot of grade school history is very local: our town, our province, our country. Similar events on the other side of the world get missed.
Canadians like to joke that our country is just three companies in a trench coat, but there was a time when we were literally just one company in a fur coat.
Oh yeah, the HBC is up there with the East India Company. Imagine an alternate history where it continued to exist and just became a generic department store.
Oh by the way the North West Company which was a rival to the HBC also still exists. It merged with the HBC but was spun back off as its own thing in the 90s. It's a grocery store now.
When I teach this fact to my Social Studies classes I make it relatable by telling them it’s kind of like if Amazon was the government. It’s such an insane fact of Canadian history that it’s hard to wrap your head around it fully.
The Companies were a pure horror. When Lenin is talking about imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism this is the kind of thing he had his eye on
Literally one of the most powerful and evil organizations in history, reduced first to a department store, and then to a scrap heap. When people think that their king will live forever, remember than not even gods or corporations live forever.
“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Hudson’s Bay, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
It took the Empire podcast for me to fully realize India was basically the same thing- just the East India Company. Full army and navy owned by a corporation that ran India for many many years with a handshake deal with the British crown.
Russian North Pacific (including colonisation of Alaska) was also built on the fur trade. Literally led to several major species extinctions and nearly wiped out sea otters (along with many indigenous groups exposed to disease and colonial violence) https://academic.oup.com/book/7213
An amazing thing about the east Indian company is that when they were completely dominant on the Indian subcontinent, they were less than 300 people at head office in London.
One of the real complexities about Scottish/Welsh nationalism is that it focuses on them being victims of English colonialism which, like... they absolutely *were*, but they were also very willing participants in it! Both countries were *wildly* overrepresented in plantation ownership, etc.
The experience of British rule varied a lot between Highlands and Lowlands, Scotland just doesn't fit into a neat dichotomy of colonized and colonizer, but they were not subject to anything close to what the Irish were
Wait 'til you hear the numbers of Scots (and to a lesser extent Manx) working for the Hudson's Bay Company, starting at the end of the 18th century. Many of them took "country wives", who were FN. Once they had enough money, they would dump those women/any kids, move "home" to marry in he church.
I have learned the extent of the crimes perpetrated against First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada. I benefit from those crimes which the Canadian government has recognized as genocide. Past & ongoing.
A number of Highland Scots, who were defeated in 1740 at Culloden, moved to what's now NC at the invite of the 🇬🇧 Duke of Cumberland who defeated them. They turned right around & fought for 🇬🇧 in the Revolutionary War & were defeated again. Scots ammirite? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have so many Scottish ancestors...
I get kind of excited when I read about talk of Scottish independence even though I am 🇺🇸 & it really is none of my business. ✌️😁
"Nova Scotia" means "New Scotland," and the colony of what is now known as the mainland portion of British Columbia was briefly called "New Caledonia," which means "New Scotland."
Tbh that’s kind of true of colonial theatres, including North America. The Cree moved west for pretty much the exact same reasons as everyone else right up until the end.
Yes, there are a lot of jokes about countries being "3 companies in a trench coat" but I don't know if it's ever been truer than the HBC and early Canada
It’s wild. In school we’re taught that X Country colonized Y Country, but it was often a private company that just… conquered and own entire nation(s)?
The private companies had royal charters giving them the right to do it -- just as the groups that settled in Plymouth or Virginia or Boston did. The Indigenous residents didn't respect that, but other Europeans did.
I only know about it, tangentially, because of the Netflix series Frontier (with Jason Mamoa). Which is about attempts to destroy Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trade monopoly in the 18th century.
Yes. This was before Canada was actually a country of course. In India also, the British East India Company established itself as a trading company. As did the Dutch East India company establish itself in Indonesia. These companies were interested in trade. Colonial rule later.
It's so surreal to learn about this company in your social studies classes as this founding force of your country only to have them completely fall apart 350 years later.
I had a conservative friend who was into "frontier history" and I asked him once if he knew companies ran the frontier and ordered many, many, many massacres of innocents just to pillage their natural resources.
Then I got him to watch Frontier on netflix, which is partly about that. he came around
And the Dutch East India Company which sprung what is now South Africa. I live in Cape Town, seemingly a refreshment station. Though much like Canada there were people already here, many of them died.
My favourite part is how they call it Canada’s oldest company, but it was headquartered in London for 300 years. Didn’t incorporate in Canada till 1970.
And in the 20th century it had oil & gas and distilling interests, and figured they were the businesses it needed to sell. (Then again, in the 70s we probably all figured department stores would be around forever)
If you enjoyed learning about this, the whole history of the foundation of the British Empire and much of the Dutch revolves around similar themes and similar semi-private companies. You've probably heard the names Dutch East India Company and British East India Company.
I didn't know that. I also didn't know that a key driver of the American revolution (and why they dumped tea in the Boston harbor) was the fear that the east India company would begin doing business in the US.
It wasn't until I moved to the first vancouver and spent a year volunteering at Fort Vancouver that I learned the extent of the hbc's influence. Also solved the mystery of why there were so many Pacific Islanders on this side of the river. The pacific trade is quite the story
And the North West Company, with which they eventually merged (if I remember my social studies correctly)! My great grandfather was supposedly one of HBC's last generation of trappers, but idk much about it. Happy reading! 🍁
So all of my knowledge is secondhand, but it's very much a "work or die" culture - you worked non-stop, you took work home, you worked through lunch, and literally the only way to get ahead was to get someone else fired.
And one of the most lucrative trading partners was the Chinese aristocracy who wanted beaver furs for their robes, and Irkutsk was a waypoint between Canada and China, and traders learned about smallpox inoculation in Irkutsk
We've got some great reading history-wise about Canada. I always thought it was so strange that a 355-year-old company was the department store where we shopped for back to school clothes.
It's weird to think that store used to run most of our country. Imagine if we'd been founded by, say, Walmart.
I went to the local one last week -- bought some underwear. I feel sorry for the staff. I guess the last big Cdn dept store we lost was Zellers. Before that, Eaton's.
My favourite HBC story -- there were a handful of British guys in the Hudson Bay fort, when a bunch of French warships showed up. The British surrendered. (The guy in charge thought it wasn't worth dying.) The French sabotaged the cannons (they're still there), and left.
I only learned recently that there weren't really governments that mattered for a long time.
The trading companies all ran shit and plundered and pillaged and made war.
1) And a couple of decades later, most of the labourers were Métis. Was it then a Metis company? The use of desperate Scottish labourers doesn’t not make it Scottish, it was an English chartered company, and administrators were English. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/download/10839/11750/
2) nothing in that article suggests the HBC ‘ruled’ Canada. They controlled the trade in a part of it, and for a period had a governorship role (first by an absent English prince). They did not rule over it by any stretch of that definition.
With the rich irony that it was Francophone fur-traders who brought the location and knowledge of the trapping grounds to the British, because the governor of new France decided to be a petty wiener about des groseilliers and radisson.
I doubt that had New France established the trading at Hudson Bay, The overall history would have changed much. B/c the fate of NF was decided largely by what went on in Europe, rather than continent. And then the us revolution.
if NF had that area, not Britain, would different decisions be made?
All of this to note importantly that there were lots of indigenous people that lived in what becomes Rupert's land, who didn't agree to be governed by the Hudson's Bay company.
Fun stuff. Like the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the British East India Company, etc. Some imperialist monarch issues a divine decree giving unction to a violent, theft-driven corporation given royal license to commit any crimes they want to bring booty back to the crown.
Oh, you've bought all the PR Canada has been pushing all these decades? They're not so much different from anyone else. Same ugly 17th/18th century histories as what became the US.
The absolute wild thing is that they famously sold these colour striped blankets that were the exact things they infected with smallpox and disease and gave to indigenous people knowing it would kill them. It was like their most famous item.
Scotland basically went bankrupt at the end of the 17th century because of the Darien project. That led the way to the Act of Union which in turn made it easier for Scots entrepreneurs to access English financiers.
Basically the Scots became the stormtroopers of English imperialism.
Scots left to seek their fortunes and built empires *because* the English took their money. After the Jacobite Rebellion was crushed, most of the Highlands aristocracy was attainted and replaced with English and Lowlands lords, who then depopulated the region in the Highlands Clearances.
Scotland did import a lot of capital from colonial activities (much of which was, yes, basically plunder). There were many grandiose projects in Scotland, but a lot of the money was reinvested in other colonial business interests. Some was invested in the US, too!
It's weird watching it go under: Nobody I know really shopped there in the past 25 years, and it's sad to see a Canadian institution closing its doors (and laying off staff), BUT there's some serious Schadenfreude in seeing it founder. Our Native population, especially, has been rejoicing.
When I was younger I used to model in the catalogues and it's frankly been part of life until a few years ago -employed family members, been a lunchtime wander etc.
But on the whole - I appreciate that evil powers can wither and die.
We'll never repair what they did to the Indigenous peoples.
I've bought a couple of watches online from them in recent years. A few months ago I went to see what they had at their West Edmonton Mall location and it was a shell of itself.
RIP ‘Hudson’s Bay, a retailer with roots in Canada dating back more than 350 years, is facing liquidation after failing to secure the financing it needs to keep its stores open.’
‘Hudson’s Bay is older than Canada. It was established in 1670 as a fur trading company under a royal charter from…Charles II. At its height, it controlled vast parts of what would become Canada, …
Hudson's Bay company expanded east to Newfoundland just as the Beothuk people became no more (extinct).
Western societies moved into the region and forced Indigenous people out of their territory & way of life.
😓
It's a large part of how Europeans, particularly the English & Dutch, managed colonial expansion in the 1600s-1800s, as a privatised operation by merchant adventurers. The British Empire of the 19th Century was, in many ways, built on a nationalisation of the East India Company, et al.
Mercantilism is an absolutely buckwild economic system and countries like Russia have been doing the same in Africa for the last decade (security guarantees in exchange for resource rights). It's the colonialism that is much harder to see and identify.
History class was fun. Especially when commerce was guns and //checks notes beaver pelts. It’s probably why our country doesn’t seem real sometimes with its very odd events.
Take a look at the East India Company, which basically ruled India, and the Dutch East India Co. Empires didn't have complex structures for governing far-away places, so outsourced to a private for-profit company.
Comments
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-untold-story-of-the-hudsons-bay-company/
https://youtu.be/TVY8LoM47xI?si=PqRYZKcSEN9AsC19
I would take the Northwest Passage/
To find the hand of Franklin/
Reaching for the Beaufort Sea🎶
It's a good trait. Embrace it!
This little community, like most in Nunavut, has a tiny remnant of the HBC: an outlet of The Northern Store. Pictured here in a season currently unavailable at this location.
Wait that’s a terrible defense….
—somehow not even the most evil fucks in history
It's a visceral thrill to me, a genuine jab-the-pleasure-center-of-my-brain moment.
The frame of "semi-feudal" ... Whoa
Everyone has a different list of them they absolutely don't know because WOW is there a lot of knowledge and the human brain is both incredible and also a smol bean doing its best, y'know?
If someone claims to know them all, they lie!
There are tons of stuff about other areas of NA that we definitely don't learn about.
Someone else in this thread has tipped Teillet's book about the Métis, so my other rec is Bown's Dominion, about the railway:
https://www.amazon.ca/Dominion-Railway-Canada-Stephen-Bown/dp/0385698720
A lot of the book was very new to me.
White folks in the 1700-1900s were just nasty. To the environment, to the natives, to each other.
But yeah, very much like the east india company.
even today they have huge barriers against trade… between the provinces! it’s crazy
It’s weird
What a bizarre way to operate.
My 3rd great grandpa was the eldest and he traveled home to the Orkney Islands to recruit his younger brothers, twice.
The youngest broke contract and ran away.
There are Metis resources online. I can give advice too, if you want.
More like 450 years old
The British treated them with mercury and made poison hats out of them. 😂 😂
https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/canada-in-the-world
Poetic justice that the failing corp, under late capitalism, gets wrapped up in the infected blanket of a US private equity firm. Devourer becomes devoured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%27s_History?wprov=sfla1
THE FUR MUST FLOW
Sorry, the fur must flow, eh?
“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Hudson’s Bay, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
https://academic.oup.com/book/7213
https://youtu.be/M-sfrec7c9o?si=yhvB4qNBhsq95ty0
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/otters
It seems that this is a human trait throughout history. People B get abused by people A, then in turn people B feel free to abuse people C...
We see it throughout global history.
Zoom in on a map of Canada and you will see Scottish names EVERYWHERE.
Entire countries are shrines to Scotland LOL (I'm like 90% Scottish heritage fwiw)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/house-motion-recognize-genocide-1.6632450
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moore%27s_Creek_Bridge
I get kind of excited when I read about talk of Scottish independence even though I am 🇺🇸 & it really is none of my business. ✌️😁
https://www.nps.gov/mocr/index.htm
Interestingly the Brits use the participation of Scots and Welsh in the Brit empire to try & undermine the case for independence.
Poverty is always the great driver. The uneducated get blamed, the rich control and middle class lead.
Then I got him to watch Frontier on netflix, which is partly about that. he came around
So yes, that is one way of describing Canadian history, and it is also a great way to describe the entire British Imperial system.
Curiously, this month it was announced that most of the Hudson’s Bay Company apart from six stores will be liquidated over the next three months.
i'll show myself out.
I went to the local one last week -- bought some underwear. I feel sorry for the staff. I guess the last big Cdn dept store we lost was Zellers. Before that, Eaton's.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/prince-of-wales-fort
The trading companies all ran shit and plundered and pillaged and made war.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5469789
2. rulership: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5469789
if NF had that area, not Britain, would different decisions be made?
We all gotta start somewhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Scots_Invented_the_Modern_World
Basically the Scots became the stormtroopers of English imperialism.
But on the whole - I appreciate that evil powers can wither and die.
We'll never repair what they did to the Indigenous peoples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy:_The_Relentless_Rise_of_the_East_India_Company
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/topstories/who-owns-hudson-s-bay-and-why-canada-s-oldest-company-is-going-out-of-business/ar-AA1Bbob1?ocid=BingNewsSerp
The company transitioned into retail in 1881’
Western societies moved into the region and forced Indigenous people out of their territory & way of life.
😓
https://g.co/kgs/TD87yCF
Of course it is also a part of our historical abuses of our aboriginal peoples.
Definitely important history.