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The Hudson's Bay Company is usually seen as a group of explorers and fur traders, an image reinforced by fur trade historians who focus on officers, native-European relations, women, and "fur trade society," while paying scant attention to the majority of the HBC's men who were labourers and tradesmen. The notion that trading posts resembled traditional households in which subordinate members were subsumed has come to dominate the discussion of HBC employees, thereby relegating them to the margins of Canadian history. Labour historians tend to ignore the HBC altogether. But, the posts and ships of the HBC were workplaces and, therefore, "contested terrain," as indeed was the pre-industrial household itself. The assumption, shared by the London committee and fur trade historians, that order and subordination were the norm in such traditional settings means that conflict and disobedience are considered almost aberrant and attributed to ethnic peculiarities. The HBC has thus come to be seen as a monolithic, paternalistic organization in which all members were united in a mentalite characteristic of the harmonious, pre-industrial society from which most of them were drawn. However, pre-industrial social relations were negotiated, not imposed from the top. This thesis rests on the assumption that such negotiation occurred in the HBC and explores this relationship for the period 1770-1870, a century of drastic change for the company. The HBC's archives preserve the journals, logs, and reports of unusual events, which officers and ships' captains had to submit, correspondence between them and the London committee, letters from HBC recruiters, petitions from servants asking for assistance or demanding justice, and a variety of personal letters. These records document the behaviour and views of both officers and servants and reveal that conflict was very much a part of life in the HBC. Regardless of ethnicity and like other workers, HBC men negotiated the terms of their engagements, retained customs and habits their superiors abandoned, engaged in private trade, were frequently disobedient and defiant, tried to control the pace and conditions of their work, and acted collectively to increase wages or oppose unfair treatment.
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Historians have tended to view the Hudson's Bay Company `as an organization of crafty fur traders, bold explorers, lively voyageurs, and dour Scots' who opened up the Canadian west and protected it from American control. More recently, social historians have examined the roles of women and Native peoples to show that the HBC `was more than a business.' But, as Professor Edith Burley demonstrates, `the HBC was a business...the purpose of which was to provide shareholders with a return on their investments.' Low paid, subservient workers were required to fulful this purpose. In Servants of the Honourable Company, Professor Burley focuses on the work and workers of the HBC. About 15% of HBC workers were skilled tradesmen, while 70% were common labourers. Until now, however, these `servants' have been largely forgotten. The book looks at these workers from the points of view both of the HBC officers and the London committee and governor who oversaw the operations and of the men themselves, who came from the Orkney Islands, Norway, Scotland, Lower Canada, and the Red River Colony, the settlement created by the HBC in present-day Manitoba to become the nursery of future `halfbreed' workers for the company. The HBC sought workers from pre-industrial societies who would accept the traditional master-servant relationship. To a large extent they did. In fact, they never questioned this central tenet of the HBC hierarchy. They did, however, bargain for higher wages, refuse to work under intolerable and dangerous conditions, object to unfair treatment by authoritarian officers, cause work stoppages in protest for sufficient food and more grog, mutiny against tyrannical ships' captains, and even kill a particularly brutal officer. Servants of the Honourable Company details this important aspect of Canadian working-class experience. --Unattributed synopsis at Amazon