The Making of a Company Colony: The Fur Trade War, the Colonial Office, and the Metamorphosis of the Hudson’s Bay Company

Abstract

This article argues that between 1810 and 1816 the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) underwent a managerial metamorphosis: where it had previously and then only timidly claimed economic privileges and authority in North America, after this period the company’s directors in London began staking claim to authority over legal, political, and even humanitarian affairs in the area covered by its charter, Rupert’s Land. Building on arguments that have been used to theorize the East India Company, this article concludes that in making these claims the hbc became what might be called a company colony, seeking to act as both a private business and a colonial government endowed with the power of the British state. In presenting this new interpretation of the hbc’s early nineteenth-century experiences, we challenge the persistent historiographical depiction of the hbc as a business-first organization operating outside the traditional patterns of the so-called Second British Empire, thereby offering a new way of understanding both the hbc and other British chartered trading companies during the nineteenth century.