Commerce by a Frozen Sea : Native Americans and the European Fur Trade by Carlos Ann M.(Author)

Author:Carlos, Ann M.(Author) [Carlos, Ann M.(Author)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-02-01T20:12:49+00:00

Any comparison of real incomes across such dissimilar populations as the Cree of the Hudson Bay region and low-wage households in England is complicated by differences in prices and the mix of goods they consumed. Still, our findings on food, clothing, shelter, and luxury goods allow us to estimate a range of relative living standards for the two groups. In food,

180 Chapter 7

Native Americans had a distinct advantage. Indeed, by European standards they were extraordinarily well fed. Theirs was a predominantly meat diet, where at least 70 percent of that meat was from large game (see Table 10). By contrast, low-income English households allocated more than 70 percent of their food expenditure to grains and potatoes,57 from which they obtained 85 percent of their calories.58 Even the highest-income workers in England consumed half their calories in grain and potatoes, suggesting that the English wanted their diet to include these foods, but because low-income households consumed much more than 50 percent of their calories as grain and potatoes, their diet must be regarded as far inferior to the diets of both high-income English households and Native Americans. This difference is important to our standard-of-living comparisons.59

Not only did natives have a superior diet, they also wore higher-quality clothing. Based on the price of skins at the York Factory post expressed in made beaver and the conversion in England at five shillings per made bea-ver, native families were consuming £13 per year, while low-wage English households consumed just £1.2. Even if skins are valued at the rate of exchange at the post, the implied value of native clothing, at £2.6, was roughly twice the English worker’s expenditure. The high quality of native clothing was dictated to a large degree by the severe climate and the nature of natives’ shelter, but even so, any measure of real income must consider this item as having favored Native Americans.

If Indians were very well fed and clothed by English standards, the reverse was true of housing. The reason was less their expenditure on housing than the semi-nomadic nature of native life. Natives may have spent as much on housing as low-wage English workers, but the cost of a house to the sedentary English worker could be amortized over many years, which meant that the annual cost was very much less than the value of the building. By contrast, native housing fully or almost fully depreciated each year. Largely because of the permanence of their dwellings, the English invested much more in them. Native housing, as a result, was worth just one-tenth the housing of even low-wage English workers. Part of the cost of shelter, however, included fuel, and since natives consumed at least as much fuel as the English, the cost ratio for shelter was greater than one to ten. In England the cost of fuel was 40 percent of rent.60 Assuming the fuel consumed by natives was equivalent raises the overall value of natives’ shelter to one-third that of English workers. In fact, given their easy

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.