North America’s Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, 1580–1850 by George Colpitts (review)

No one reads Harold Adams Innis’s masterwork on the subject anymore, but the fur trade remains prominent in Canada’s national imaginary and a vibrant scholarly field cutting across historical themes and approaches. Colpitts jettisons Innis’s nation-building, casting his net across the French and English (later British) Atlantic empires in North America from contact to the decline, by 1850, of the Indian trade as a major commercial activity in the eastern half of the continent. Yet Colpitts returns to Innis’s emphasis on the fur trade as trade to ask how Europeans extended not only their goods and commerce into First Nations societies, but also stretched and adapted their ideas about commerce. They imagined and reimaged the ‘Indian trade’ as similar to or distinct from their own against the backdrop of changes in the trade itself, shifting commercial and imperial interests, and debates in Europe about the morality and efficacy of consumption and markets. The astonishing array of authors of travel and missionary accounts, petitions, merchant and colonial correspondence, and periodical and other literatures speaks to Colpitts’s impressive labours, but also to the sustained European effort to understand the trade and thus why this intellectual history of the fur trade is long overdue.

The book offers readers greater return on investment if – like the petty traders whose distance from metropolitan oversight so alarmed officials of church and state – readers strike out on their own in search of thought-provoking ambiguities and recurring patterns over time and across diverse locales rather than attempt to follow the sometimes-obscure narrative paths marked for them. And what an emporium awaits: trade not as relatively straightforward acts of material barter but ongoing and reciprocal relations idealised, abused, or misunderstood in and between Aboriginal gift economies; Europeans’ own conception of gifts; an economy of debt and credit or diplomacy; whether commerce promoted understanding and softened manners or corrupted; the market as both a physical place to be policed to ensure a ‘just price’ and a more abstract process perhaps able to arbitrate between competing value systems, preferences, and interests; unstable evaluations of luxury and monopoly as opposed to competition; and especially whether ‘Indians’ were utility-maximisers motivated by self-interest or traded within more culture-specific worlds that suggested to some the need for greater regulation even once more liberal approaches to trade dominated European opinion.

This is intellectual history, not discourse analysis. While the place of the Indian trade in European commerce (half the book’s title) helps us understand the welter of voices, at times this context threatens to overwhelm the analysis of texts that place that trade in the European imagination (the other half of the title and the book’s more original contribution). Moreover, it constricts attention to other contexts: especially the more precise points of intersection between these texts and the broader conversations about commerce which Colpitts ably demonstrates they participated in. One might also juxtapose this book with the emerging history of capitalism and globalisation literatures. The fur trade may no longer be the defining staple of Canadian development, but Colpitts shows it was a staple of how Europeans thought about the First Nations and traders and about buying and selling in general.