‘Animated like Us by Commercial Interests’: Commercial Ethnology and Fur Trade Descriptions in New France, 1660-1760
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, French colonial correspondents, crown employees, and military officers began to describe in more detail the North American fur trade. They furnished to the metropolis more information concerning the exchange between Amerindians and Europeans, and they underscored the cultural and economic benefits that arose in exchange. For the first time, writers interested themselves in the details of exchange, identified the needs of Amerindians for European goods, and suggested that the social disposition of New World people could be ameliorated in a trade with Europeans. Drawing on new metropolitan understandings of commerce and the marketplace, writers identified ways that the trade could link Amerindians peacefully with French interests. Descriptions also suggested that the passion of interet guided Amerindians and prompted them, as consumers, to seek the best prices on goods. This article situates texts of this type – and the ethnological information they contain – in their commercial context. It concludes that many memoirs, reports, and, later, published ethnological narratives describing the fur trade were written by parties interested in protecting or expanding their investments in newly discovered inland regions, particularly in the Illinois and Mississippi watersheds. Abstract: A partir du milieu du XVIIe siecle, les correspondants coloniaux francais, les employes de la Couronne et les officiers de ľArmee commencerent a donner du commerce des fourrures en Amerique du Nord une description plus nette. Ils fournissaient a la metropole une quantite accrue ďinformation sur les echanges entre Amerindiens et Europeens et ils soulignaient les avantages culturels et economiques qui en decoulaient. Pour la premiere fois, les auteurs s’interessaient aux details du troc, identifiaient les besoins des Amerindiens en marchandises europeennes et suggeraient que le commerce avec les Europeens pouvait ameliorer la situation sociale des peuples du Nouveau Monde. Se fondant sur la nouvelle maniere qu’avait la metropole de comprendre le commerce et le marche, les auteurs identifierent divers moyens de lier pacifiquement interets amerindiens et interets francais par le biais du commerce. Les descriptions suggeraient de plus que la passion de ľ«interet» guidait les Amerindiens et les incitait, en tant que consommateurs, a rechercher les meilleurs prix pour les marchandises. Le present article replace des textes de cette nature – ainsi que ľinformation ethnologique qu’ils renferment – dans leur contexte commercial. Il conclut qu’un grand nombre de memoires et de rapports ainsi que, plus tard, de recits ethnologiques publies sur le commerce cies fourrures furent ecrits par des parties interessees a proteger ou a etendre leurs investissements dans les regions de ľinterieur que ľon venait de decouvrir, en particulier dans les bassins de ľIllinois et du Mississippi.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".