Scott P. Stephen, Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668-1786 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press 2019)

In Masters and Servants, Scott P. Stephen has probed the voluminous archival holdings of the Hudson’s Bay Company (correspondence, minute books, accounts, and post journals) to unpack the nitty-gritty details of labour relations within the Hudson’s Bay Company during the corporation’s long first century (1668-1786). Stephen’s central argument is that the Hudson’s Bay Company’s labour relations were underwritten by deep-rooted understandings of master-servant relationships within a household setting and that Company posts should be construed as “household factories.” Indeed, as Stephen demonstrates, the patriarchal household family made up of a master (the patriarch) and a family of kin, apprentices, and servants, was the dominant social construct of early modern Britain and its overseas colonies and trading companies.

As Stephen demonstrates, the hbc’s household factory was diverse. Hudson’s Bay Company servants were not just Londoners and Orcadians, but also Canadien voyageurs who had absconded from French posts, Inuit and Chipewyan captives sold to factors by Lowland Cree raiders, and even the “mixed-blood” sons of hbc fathers and Indigenous mothers. The labour requirements of hbc factories were also diverse. The London Committee, governors, and factors demanded servants that could fulfill a variety of roles such as general labourers, mariners, officers, clerks, surgeons, and myriad tradesmen—armourers, bricklayers, carpenters, coopers, gunsmiths sawyers, shipwrights, and tailors—as well as more specialized labour in the form of birchbark canoe-makers and linguistic and cultural interpreters.

Stephen’s study outlines two major periods of the Company’s history. The period from the 1670 charter to the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht was marked by an initial flurry of development along the Hudson Bay littoral followed by massive instability in both recruitment and retention of labour due to wartime conditions and French bayside military excursions. The second period, following the peace of 1713, was marked by much-needed stability and security and saw the Company’s labour needs expanded and diversified as it established slooping (coastal trading) operations, whale fisheries, and several inland trading houses—Henley House (1743), Flamborough House (1749), and Cumberland House (1774). Stephen’s analysis ends in 1786 when the hbc created the position of chief inland factor, which shifted the managerial centre of gravity and reoriented the balance of power of the coastal household factory.

Stephen does a particularly good job at drawing comparisons of labour relations to early modern Britain and other long-distance British trading companies, like the East Indian Company (eic), Royal African Company (rac), and the Levant Company, to show how the master-servant relationship and the household system reflected larger trends in British imperialism. Unfortunately, Stephen does not provide a sense of whether there was something uniquely British about the household factory, and does not venture into French, Dutch, Spanish Atlantic Worlds to juxtapose the hbc’s model of household governance against non-British trading companies, such as the French Compagnie du Nord, which operated in Hudson Bay alongside the hbc for decades. The lack of transnational or trans-imperial comparison opens the question as to how French or Canadien Company servants, like Jean-Baptise D’Laryea and Louis Primeau (whose careers are outlined by Stephen), saw themselves fitting into the structures of the household system with its reciprocal obligations, deferential and paternalistic behaviours, and social and moral covenants. To Stephen’s credit, however, he does a much better job at teasing out social relations between the Homeguard Cree and the hbc, demonstrating how the Cree often imposed their own conceptions of kinship through marriage alliances in order to create reciprocal social connections on unwitting hbc factors and servants, which produced tensions within the household factory that mandated that servants remained celibate.

While the “household factory” produced a remarkably secure and stable political-economic entity that connected the Hudson Bay watershed fur trade economy to the larger British Atlantic World, Stephen also points to where the household factory stressed and strained, particularly under the pressures of illicit private trade and relationships with Indigenous women, both of which challenged the model of household governance at the Bay.

In sum, this is an important publication that will be of interest to labour historians, as well as scholars of the North American fur trade and early modern Britain.

Scott Berthelette

Queen’s University