The Fur Trade in Canada

In the tropical zones of mainland America and the Caribbean islands, plantations became a key vehicle for imperial expansion—an early hothouse of intensive production which boosted Caribbean populations from 200,000 to two million over a couple of centuries. The indigenous population, as noted in the last chapter, had no place in this system and was largely destroyed or its remnants absorbed. But the labour requirements of the plantation system, its location, and the diseases it engendered also shaped a demography weighted against white settlers, especially in the Caribbean. At the northern limits of European intrusion, on the Atlantic coast, down the St Lawrence River, and on the shores of the Hudson Bay, the imperial frontier was extended more by trade than by agrarian settlement. In this chapter, we illustrate how the natural environment of this region, as well as economic and political forces, influenced the routes of intrusion and patterns of interaction. In contrast to the Caribbean, Native Americans had a major role in supplying imperial markets. Coastal settler society in the Americas, from Boston north, grew partly around the cod fisheries. The Grand Banks off the Canadian coast were a particularly rich source of cod and had been fished by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Basques since the sixteenth century or before. By the early seventeenth century, as many as 300 French and 150 British ships were recorded at one time on what became the Canadian coast. Cod fisheries were largely run by Europeans and based on European technology. They became the basis for an important export trade in dried and salted cod, bacalhau, to Europe and the Caribbean, where sources of protein were in short supply. On the sugar islands, especially, there were severe constraints on keeping livestock, and a lack of indigenous species to hunt. Dried cod, traded from North to Central America, to some degree filled this dietary gap; not only did it last well but it was also light to transport. Crosby has argued that North America was particularly porous with respect to the absorption of Eurasian animal and plant species and that these greatly facilitated settler colonialism.

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