Meaning and Markets: Hunting, Economic Development and British Imperialism in Maritime Travel Narratives to 1870

PROMOTING THE SETTLEMENT IN 1624 OF WHAT are now the Maritime Provinces and the Gaspe Peninsula, Sir William Alexander promised gentlemen a life with “all sorts of objects to satisfie the varietie of desires. I might speake of the sport that may bee had by Hunting, Hawking, Fishing, and Fowling”. As commodities of “forreine Traffique”, the targets of such sport offered merchants “a great benefit” they could claim “without dispossessing others” because the existing inhabitants did not “appropriate to themselves any peculiar ground, but . . . runne like beasts after beasts, seeking no soile, but onely after their prey”.1 Hunting was at once an activity of sport, profit and subsistence – a mark of social rank, an object of commercial exchange and the meanest form of production. Later, it became a magnet for tourists as well. Representations of hunting were central to the economic and cultural construction of empire in the Maritimes. Who hunted, how and for what purpose invested hunting with divergent utilitarian and ritualistic meanings.2 The former emphasized the creation of use or exchange value from a physical environment of exploitable resources. The latter emphasized the symbolic where “nature” served as a special moral or aesthetic realm. As part of his stage theory, Adam Smith posited an unproblematic progression from the former to the latter: “hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity”.3 Hunting was likewise important to the economic thinking of British travellers to the Maritimes. But rather than being deployed only sequentially and to reflect progress, utilitarian and ritualistic meanings of hunting often co-existed and exposed considerable anxiety about the economic development travellers otherwise promoted. Moreover, rather than moving directly from necessity to amusement, representations of hunting passed through an intermediate phase as a foil for the values of an agrarian settler society.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.