A Legacy of Exploitation: Early Capitalism in the Red River Colony, 1763-1821, 2022

Business historians across the spectrum, from Arthur Ray to Michael Bliss, have inspired serious reconsideration of the development of Canadian society and state. Yet, despite the centrality of business to economic history, Marxist readings of Canadian business history remain rare. Therefore, the historical materialist approach proposed by Susan Dianne Brophy in A Legacy of Exploitation, in which the “means of production” provide the basis for social structure, is worth serious consideration.

A Legacy of Exploitation proposes a new history of early capitalism in the Red River colony. Grappling with Indigenous labour and the legacy of exploitation, it links the fur trade to settler colonialism, or more precisely land dispossession. Foregrounding “the economic and legal terms of labour compulsion” (12) the book professes to explore the uncomfortable roots of the fantasy of Canada as a glorious country founded by adventurers. But is this fantasy worth serious analysis? One might say yes, the founded-by-adventurers myth was recently employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in an advertising campaign, echoing the more famous, and more crude, “I am Canadian” beer commercials. The campaign may sell hiking gear, but it is not a fair reflection of the otherwise excellent scholarship in this field. And the reader has the sense that this book relies upon a straw man for its premise.

The book first outlines the use of historical materialism and the transformative potential of Indigenous knowledge for Marxist theory. A reader may conclude from this that the goal is to improve the theory rather than our understanding of the past. The next two chapters present the colonial ambitions of fur trading companies in the interior of Northern North America and the argument for recognizing Indigenous autonomy. Chapters three and four introduce the efforts of the HBC to exercise their monopoly on the trade and the dreams of Lord Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk and his allies to establish a settler colonial experiment. Chapters five and six present the clash between Selkirk’s ambitions and reality, which flamboyantly resulted in the famous Battle of Seven Oaks. The climax of the story is the Treaty of 1817 between Lord Selkirk and five identified Saulteaux and Nehiyaw groups.

Brophy’s close reading of the Selkirk papers is interesting. Her intellectual history of what she has termed the “Malthusian Candidate,” is a revealing analysis of Selkirk. More might have been done to reflect on Selkirk’s intellectual development, particularly his reaction to the failure of the two previous settlements in Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada. But she fails to incorporate the social and political context of Red River with its extensive primary and secondary literature.

It is a red herring to argue against the notion that the HBC was “enjoying the vestiges of its monopoly” in the early nineteenth century (73). The same can be said for the suggestion that “some historians” (78) saw the period as passive. Historiography has moved past these shibboleths from the 1960s. Brophy’s analysis of the competition between the HBC and its competitors does not reference recent literature, and historians of New France will be disappointed in the treatment of French involvement in this history of early capitalism in the Northwest.

There is little discussion of how the HBC confronted different Indigenous groups, who tend to be treated as a “bloc” rather than as distinct peoples with their own interests and histories. Nor are Canadian and American free-traders differentiated. Relationships that waxed and waned get treated as stable. Both the violent incident at Henley House in 1755 and the creation of the Deed Poll in 1821, for instance, show us the HBC adopting its policy to real-world realities. The relationship between the metropole and the traders is more complex than the dichotomies often found here.

The book offers an interesting argument for how autonomy or a “free market” contributed to dispossession. However, it is unclear why what Rosa Luxemburg called “a fragile synthesis through metabolism” (7) of the pre-capitalist modes of production is linked to the dispossession of land. Using the works of classical Marxist theorists, such as Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and even Lenin as context is provocative. For lack of historicization, however, the theoretical displaces the empirical. Brophy suggests, for example, that the treaty of 1817 “borrowed from the customary traditions of feudalism” (178) but does not explain her use of the word “feudalism” and neglects the debates over its application.

Critical legal history plays an important role in the analysis, and Brophy compellingly argues that “it is oversimplification…to deem legal relations as exercising a fettering effect on the commercial exchange.” (14) Many western Canadian legal historians would undoubtedly agree. The book makes useful links between the economy, sovereignty, property law, and law enforcement, with reference to the work of British imperial historians like Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, as well as prairie legal historians like Hamar Foster. The discussion of early policing by Selkirk and his agent Miles Macdonnell is particularly intriguing and readers will undoubtedly be inspired to make connections to police reforms being made by Peel in Ireland at the same time. However, the legal rights of the company were and would continue to be disputed in British and international courts. As a result, Selkirk’s search for sovereignty was at best “lumpy” and it is premature to see the treaty as evidence that dispossession was taking root in 1821.

The book jacket claims that it will upend a narrative that ignores the role of “Indigenous producers as a driving force of change” in the history of the Red River colony. While this book may serve its purpose, framed as “above all a political intervention,” other scholarship in the field is not well integrated. Casually dismissing relevant scholarship of other historians as problematic (Charles Bishop) or overly rational (Elizabeth Manke) without serious engagement with their writing weakens the argument.

In terms of writing, the constant use of a first-person pronoun is heavy-handed. Heavily burdened by positioning and theory, the book makes for arduous reading and would be inaccessible for undergraduates, much less the viewers of the HBC commercials.

In the end, A Legacy of Exploitation dramatizes a “Faustian conflict,” where higher virtue is sacrificed for material gain. The drama tends to flatten history. The work by such classic scholars as Arthur Ray, Jennifer Brown, Sylvia van Kirk, and others since, taught us that the relationship between these different cultures and practices of exchange changed both sides. Here, the structure of primitive accumulation as unpaid labour prevents readers from seing how Indigenous or European men and women understood that interaction and the relationships that thus emerged.