The Age of Insecurity by Astra Taylor

Author:Astra Taylor [Taylor, Astra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2023-08-08T16:12:28+00:00

The colonial commons was always about taking, including taking the lives of wild animals deemed common property. While many species were hunted, it was the beaver who would become the North American equivalent of gold. In medieval Europe, the animals’ pelts were considered luxuries, their possession limited to elites through a series of sumptuary laws that allowed the nobility to dictate who could wear what, relegating commoners to lamb, rabbit, and cat skin. But as the merchant class rose in prominence, demand for fine fur increased. By the time Utopia was published at the start of the sixteenth century, Eurasian beavers had already been hunted to oblivion.46 When vast beaver populations were discovered in North America, enterprising investors launched another deadly hunting spree.

Instead of constructing dams and wetland habitat, beavers built fortunes and nations, their lives sacrificed for the sake of high fashion. Canada’s origins are synonymous, of course, with the beaver-pillaging Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC); the first American millionaire, John Jacob Astor, owned the monopolistic American Fur Company, using fur trade wealth to fund real estate development in New York City. Felted beaver fur top hats epitomized the masculine style of the day, their waterproof surface practical in British fog and rain. Some wearers even believed the accessory made them more intelligent—an oblique acknowledgement of the astonishing ingenuity of the tens of millions of creatures who were transformed into headwear.47

However deadly it was for beavers, the fur trade was also brutal for humans, inciting bloody conflicts, including the explicitly named Beaver Wars, while Indigenous people fought bitterly over the right to trap and control beaver supply. Decimated by disease and displaced from their territories, they had few options but to help hunt their non-human relations nearly to extinction. For Indigenous communities, the exchange of pelts for guns and other European goods was a devil’s bargain, with material insecurity the permanent condition of those who became dependent on markets designed to fleece them.48 George Simpson, who helmed the Hudson’s Bay Company at its height, became enraged when he thought trading posts were being too generous. “Interested motives” and a need for beaver, not “philanthropy” toward Indigenous people, he fumed in 1821, were the reason the company had set up shop in the northern regions.

Further south, the company took the exploitation of the colonial commons to a new extreme, aiming to make their business “more lucrative and secure,” as one historian put it, through a campaign of total annihilation.49 The ominously named “fur desert policy” sought to sabotage American rivals by creating an immense beaverless buffer across what was then called Oregon Country. As Simpson wrote in his journal in 1824, “If properly managed no question exists that it would yield handsome profits as we have convincing proof that the country is a rich preserve of Beaver and which for political reasons we should endeavor to destroy as fast as possible.” Within a year, an HBC trader reported on the initiative’s success: “This part of the Country tho’ once abounding in Beaver is entirely ruined.

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.