Apostles of Commerce: The Fur Trade in the Colonial Northwest and the Formation of a Hemispheric Religious Economy, 1807-1859

The ethnic and national melange that characterized the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the nineteenth century (Native Americans, Metis, Hawaiians, British, Americans, and French-Canadians all called it home) facilitated a wide range of local and trans-regional religious exchanges largely visible within the networks, resources, and methods of the area's foremost economy: the fur trade. I argue that this trans-continental commercialism, sustained in part by the trafficking of furs in the colonial Northwest, integrated into its system of operations a hemispheric religious economy, whereby fur trade and religious transactions manifested as conflated economic performances within the larger scope of imperial expansion. I explore a variety of religious encounters from the early stages of the trade to its collapse in the mid-century. After establishing a historiographical and interpretative framework in chapter one, I highlight, in chapter two, the interplay between indigenous prophecy and fur trade imports from eastern North America and Europe, which included not only durable goods, but also theologies and moralities. In chapter three, I underscore the role played by Hawaiian employees of fur trading companies in shaping a religious economy which linked the Northwest to a wider Pacific World exchange. In chapter four, I dissect the region's leading trade organization, the London-based Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and their exploitation of religion as a means of preserving a monopolizing control over all commercial activity in the area. Lastly, in chapters five and six, I scrutinize the Protestant and Catholic mission economies, and their comparable yet contrasting forms of dependence on the capital of fur trading giants such as the HBC. In the end, I suggest that the diffusion of religion into the "secular" - into the "commercial" and "ecological" - during the early nineteenth century set a precedent for the contemporary Northwest as the "None Zone."

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