Masters and Servants: The Hudson's Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668–1786 by Scott P. Stephen (review)

In Scott Stephen's words, "this study seeks patterns and policies in the hbc's approach to recruiting, retaining, and dismissing Euro-Canadians (mostly British) workers for its trading stations in North America" (xviii). A historian with Parks Canada, Stephen engages the topic across eight pithy chapters. Following a straightforward introduction, the first six chapters describe and interpret the London-based Hudson's Bay Company's (hbc) acquisition and retention of employees "in the hundreds" (xxi) during its first century of operating, 1668–1768, during which the hbc traded in northern North America for animal pelts, the prized underfur of the beaver becoming the felt of the hats worn as a matter of course by men with pretensions to respectability. The two final chapters assess the hierarchical nature of the master-servant relationship and the tensions existing within that relationship.

hbc employees were sojourners, leaving home in hopes of returning better off than when they departed. The trading posts, termed "factories," to which men headed were tasked to maximize the acquisition of pelts, in part through trading for them with local Indigenous peoples. The isolated locations of factories meant that employees, almost perforce, formed their own "household" in the shadow of the men in charge, known as "factors," who had their own rooms and authority over ordinary employees (xxviii).

Stephen's extensive use of examples drawn from primary and secondary sources makes for a persuasive and sometimes graphic text in which individual lives and the assumptions of the day pop off the page as we read along. His primary interest in how relationships between masters and servants played out in the everyday brings to life their settings, whose histories we are all too liable to take for granted: Moose Factory/Fort was founded in 1673 on an island near the mouth of the Moose River at James Bay in today's Quebec; York Factory/ Fort in 1679 on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay in northeastern Manitoba; Albany Fort in 1679 on James Bay at the mouth of the Albany River in northeastern Ontario; Prince of Wales Fort in 1719, north of York factory at the mouth of the Churchill River on Hudson Bay, in northeastern Manitoba; and, Cumberland House in 1774 in northeastern Saskatchewan. Reflecting on these and other sites, and on their long-ago inhabitants, encourages us to rethink the past in new ways leading to new understandings.

Masters and Servants' seeming complexity and detail is inevitable given the scope and intricacies of its topic. Compared to other overseas trading enterprises also assessed by Stephen–for example, the East India Company that sought a range of goods, including fabrics, tea, and opium in India from 1600 to 1874, and the Royal African Company that acquired along the west coast of Africa both goods and slaves for resale between 1660 and 1752–the hbc was more compact in its activities and personnel.

To make best use of his sources, Stephen approaches the topic from multiple angles, inevitably resulting in a certain amount of repetition. A paucity of information precludes certainty about some topics, such as employee recruitment in the early years (80–86). For the later time period, the author could have drawn on the invaluable online Voyageur Database detailing 35,900 fur trade contracts signed in Montreal with various companies, including the hbc, between 1714 and 1830.

Masters and Servants is a worthy addition to the scholarship on the history of the hbc, of the North American fur trade in general, and of the overseas trading enterprises that were integral to British expansion across the globe.