Labour Relations Among Bourgeois, Clerks and Voyageurs in the Montréal Fur Trade, 1780-1821
Unfair Masters and Rascally Servants? Labour Relations Among Bourgeois, Clerks and Voyageurs in the Montréal Fur Trade, 1780-1821 Carolyn Pod men ny THE HISTORY OF WORKING PEOPLES in the fur trade has recently become a subject of concentrated interest.1 The publication of Edith Burley's Servants of the Hon ourable Country, which explores the master and servant relationship between Orkney workers and Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) officers stands as an important development in focussing attention squarely on the workers themselves, and demonstrates the extent of their power through insubordination and resistance. A Some broader studies of labour and capital in early Canadian history briefly mention fur trade workers, Such as H. Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650-1860 (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co. 1981), 30-3; and Bryan D. Palmer, Working-Class Experi ence: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800-1991 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1992), 35-6. European labourers first received significant examination by Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1980). Native labourers have been subject to some examination by Carol M. Judd, "Native Labour and Social Stratification in the Hudson's Bay Company's Northern Department, 1770-1870," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 17, 4 (November 1980) 305-14. Edith I. Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson's Bay Company, 1770-1879 (Toronto, New York and Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press 1997); Philip Goldring first began to compile information on labourers in Papers on the Labour System of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1821-1900, Volume I, Manuscript Report Series, no.
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