The Hudson’s Bay Company and the East India Company

The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was established by Royal Charter from Charles II in 1670. The charter gave the company control over one third of present-day Canadian territory. This area covered most of northern Ontario, northern Québec and Saskatchewan, all of Manitoba, the southern half of Alberta and much of the Northwest Territories, as well as much of the US States of Minnesota and North Dakota. This enormous area was know as Rupert’s Land after Prince Rupert, one of the King’s cousins who helped establish the company.

The company was set up to trade for beaver pelts with the Cree and other American Indian peoples near James Bay, and continued as a trading and exploration company into the nineteenth century. Continuing to this day as Canada’s largest non-food retailer, the HBC surrendered ownership of its Rupert’s Land territory to Canada in the 1869 Deed of Surrender. In the fur trade years the company faced stiff competition from French fur traders and later the North West Company with which it subsequently merged in 1821.

American Indian trappers traded fur pelts for guns, axes, knives and predominantly woollen textiles, including blankets. By the eighteenth century the Gloucestershire broadcloths, often known as ‘strouds’ dominated the fur trade inventories in both bulk and value. Cloth, especially strouds, had been an important trade good since the seventeenth century and had even been exchanged for land and people:

‘in 1716 “Indian Peggy” appeared before the Commissioner of Trade with a “French man” purchased by her brother and given to her. The man had come dearly, costing her brother “a gun, a white Duffield match coat, two broadcloth match coats, a cutlass and some powder and paint”. Peggy was willing to exchange her hostage for the gun, and “the value of the rest of the goods might be paid her in strouds.”’¹

The East India Company was established to rival the Portuguese and Dutch in the spice trade from Asia. ‘The Company of Merchants of London Trading in to the East Indies’ was granted a fifteen-year trading monopoly in Queen Elizabeth I’s Royal Charter of 1600. James I’s new charter gave the East India Company an indefinite monopoly. The company’s activities rapidly expanded to include trade in Indian textiles and tea, and the control of large territories in the Indian subcontinent. Although much of its trading in Asia relied on the exchange of other Asian goods across the continent, the company exported large quantities of materials from Britain for trade. The company was under political pressure at home to export goods rather than bullion and from 1760 commodities dominated its exports. Woollens, including worsteds such as the Devonshire serges or long ells, made up over half the value of these commodities between 1756-1800. Other goods traded for tea included metal raw materials such as copper, iron, lead and Cornish tin. The company had difficulties finding a market for the woollens and there are reports of them being sold at a loss or languishing in Canton warehouses. However, this trade continued into the 1830s. The East India Company’s governing power was transferred to the British crown in 1858.

1 Hill S H. 1997. Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry. University of North Carolina Press. From McDowell. Colonial Records of South Carolina. Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, November 16 & 24