Outsourcing Empire by Andrew Phillips

Author:Andrew Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

GEOPOLITICS AND THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY

To what degree is the Hudson’s Bay Company representative of the company-state form? As observed earlier, its original charter was entirely typical in its combination of private and sovereign powers, not only in relation to the other company-states set up in the Restoration period, but also with reference to the Dutch and other nations’ company-states. Relative to its English East India counterpart and the Dutch VOC and WIC, however, the HBC was notable for its unwarlike disposition. The two Dutch companies maintained fleets of dozens of warships and thousands of troops, while the EIC waged a series of major wars to conquer the whole of South Asia. The HBC military resources were trivial, its battlefield record risible, and its total staff varied between 100 and 1,500 from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Even as late as 1857, when in theory its writ ran over something like a twelfth of the Earth’s land, only 139,000 Indians and 13,000 settlers inhabited its domains, and even these were largely outside the jurisdiction of the Company as such.99 The HBC had been somewhat significant in the political-economic struggle with the French to 1713, but the Company’s geopolitical significance for British North America became much greater in the nineteenth century. Though in some ways it imperiled British claims, nevertheless without the HBC there might not be a Pacific Canada today.100

But what, then, was the Company actually surrendering with the Deed of Surrender? First of all was the uncertain legal claims in the royal charter, and its 1821 parliamentary extension, of something that was not quite sovereignty and not quite ownership over the vast territory of Rupert’s Land. Secondly, it gave up the right to administer British and Canadian laws in its territories, powers that had been very seldom used in any case.101 Finally, it gave up its monopoly claim to the fur trade, a right consistently asserted but often challenged.

While the HBC did little to rule, and more to discourage than encourage colonization, its survival depended on the fact that it never took money from the public purse, whereas the only realistic alternatives for asserting any sort of British presence in the region were seen as expensive and uncertain. Because it did so little governing, there was no move to subject it to regular parliamentary control or scrutiny like the EIC, and as there was no parliamentary renewal of the charter 1690–1821, the HBC was spared the recurrent controversies that these instances occasioned for the other company-states. The HBC might have lived so long because it did so little, threatened so few, and cost outsiders nothing at all.

By the nineteenth century, however, the priority of settlement for economic but even more so geopolitical reasons trumped any respect for the Company’s chartered rights. The French threat had long gone, and relations with the Russian-American Company after 1834 were congenial. The new threat was the expanding United States. In the mid-1840s tensions rose between the British Empire and the United States over the border between them in the Pacific Northwest.

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