A Legacy of Exploitation: Early Capitalism in the Red River Colony, 1763–1821

Capitalism has a troublesome history. That word—“troublesome”—is the sign under which Susan Dianne Brophy organizes her study of the Red River Colony, a settlement founded in 1811 through a land grant from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). The colony is troublesome, as Brophy notes, for the sometimes “inscrutable” forms of exploitation and dispossession that define its origins (178). But it is troublesome, too, for the history of capitalism. The colony’s history, she contends, disrupts dominant accounts of the transition to capitalism.Across its six chapters, A Legacy of Exploitation takes this trouble head-on. Deploying the lens of dialectical materialism and emphasizing the years from 1810 to 1816, Brophy finds that Red River Colony does not fit with any transition narrative that moves from “violent chaos to peaceful order” (10). Yet in her analysis, the absence of the “direct, violent extra-economic force” in the fur trade that characterizes precapitalist labor compulsion is neither a historical nor a theoretical problem; it is the answer to each (177). Brophy argues that the initial lack and later outbreak of violence during key moments in the founding of Red River Colony—the Pemmican Proclamation; the Battle of Seven Oaks; the HBC’s merger with the Northwest Company; and the 1817 Treaty [the Selkirk Treaty]—must be understood as historically contingent responses to the “relative autonomy of Indigenous producers” (16). Such producers were neither learning to be Homo economicus nor dependent on Europeans. Quite the opposite. The HBC and Red River Colony, she shows, depended on Indigenous producers, much to their chagrin.That dependence conditioned the exploitation and dispossession of Indigenous nations, particularly the Nēhiyawok, Saulteaux, and Métis. With attention to the role of law, especially in its “everyday” forms of custom, contracts, warrants, and debts, Brophy traces how Indigenous autonomy shaped first the fur trade and second Red River (11). In doing so, she erases the boundary between a commercial colonialism after Indigenous labor and a settler colonialism after Indigenous land. Such a move is both illuminating for her own argument and invigorating for future work. Chapters detailing the operations of the truck system and debt collection in the eighteenth-century fur trade allow for a better understanding of nineteenth-century titling schemes for settlers and annuity payments for Indigenous nations. It is a testament to Brophy’s analysis that a reader might take this transition, rather than the one to capitalism, as her study’s most striking contribution.Yet capitalism hardly fades from view. Throughout, Brophy uses her account of the fur trade and the Red River Colony to wade into those conversations in the Marxist literature that coalesce into the transition debates. Of these, her critique of Marx’s so-called primitive accumulation is clearest, if a tad troublesome in its implications. Brophy challenges accounts of dispossession that start “with the theft of land, narrowly conceived,” to center private property and instead develops the concept of “social relations of land,” her term for those practices that constitute the array of social relations among Indigenous people and places (28). As a challenge to the vestigial “facile stagism” of so-called primitive accumulation, her point is well taken (177). But its wider application is itself somewhat narrow, as Brophy leaves unaddressed those Indigenous scholars and activists who articulate theories of dispossession that center the theft of land and call for its return, crystallized in the powerful demand: “Land Back.”At its best, Brophy’s book troubles rigid accounts of exploitation, dispossession, and the link that capital maintains between the two. And like most trouble, it calls out for change, both in our understandings of colonialism and in the world that colonialism has made.

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