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Exchange Patterns in the European Market for North American Furs and Skins, 1720-17601 Thomas Wien The contrast between the expansionistic Montrealers and their rivals to the north and south, who were much slower to establish posts in the interior, is one of the central themes of North American fur trade history. At no time was this asymmetry more apparent than in the later phases of the French regime. By the early 1750s, the Montreal canoe brigades supplied posts in a vast swath of Indian lands extending to the forks of the Saskatchewan in the northwest and the Sioux and the Illinois country in the southwest. Their English-speaking competitors , meanwhile, surveyed the Canadian traders from afar: a military expedition had halted the AnglO-American traders' advance into the Ohio country, and the Hudson's Bay Company's managers would wait another quarter-century before ordering the construction of inland pendants to their chain of posts on the bayshore. Just how did Canadian merchants and traders maintain their delivery service to the Indian nations of the West against rivals with no or far fewer portages to make? Harold Innis first asked the question some sixty years ago. He answered it, essentially, with disbelief. Distance, he argued, was the Montrealers' Achilles heel; to move into the interior was to face rising transport costs and increasingly expensive military entanglements with the British and their native allies. Crisisprone and overextended, the French fur-trading empire collapsed very much on schedule, in Innis's view, in 1760.2 The evidence that has accumulated since 1930 suggests, Innis to the contrary, that the Montreal trade was viable until well into the Seven Years' War. Not only did fur returns hold their own if not increase, but the marchands-voyageurs and marchands-equipeurs who prosecuted the trade tended to remain faithful to their calling , a sure sign that they found it worth their while.3 By way of explanation, scholars have pointed to the advantages of exploiting a network of posts in the interior. Some have argued that French imperialism-and its complicated system of alliances with many of the nations of the Great Lakes region-brought commercial advantage and not just an additional burden of levies on the trade;4 others have suggested that, in many cases, Indian consumers would pay a high price for goods that were delivered to them rather than taking their custom to the more distant competition.5 19 THOMAS WrEN These arguments need not be contradictory and taken together, they may well identify the principal Canadian trade secrets.6 But they are focused on North America; in neglecting the transatlantic phases of the trade cycle, they may also miss an additional source of advantages for the Montrealers. Before the nineteenth century, after all, most of the merchandise used in the North American fur trade came from Europe, and most of the furs received in return were consumed there.7 It is conceivable that, compared to their competitors, the Canadians received their goods on particularly favourable terms and sold their peltry at particularly advantageous prices. In this way, European suppliers and buyers may have done their share to help Canadian traders and merchants bear the heavy burden of costs imposed on them in the North American theatre of the trade. The European phases of the fur trade have received relatively little attention from historians. On the goods side of the ledger, only further research into the prices of merchandise imported by the Canadians and their rivals will permit us to conclude whether one or the other had a decisive advantage in this regard.s On the fur side, a few studies of the marketing of beaver, the mainstay of the trade, contradict the notion that France was a good place to sell furs. There is no doubt, for example, that the English were more successful than the French in clearing their home market of surplus beaver during the glut of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.9 While by 1720, supply and demand for this hatter's fur had come into better balance in both markets, the Canadians were still at a disadvantage: now the French Indies Company used its monopoly of beaver exports from Canada to France to set a particularly low price for this kind of fur. It is true that the Montrealers recouped part of their losses by sending some of their beaver to New York, where the higher prices of the British system obtained, but this...

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