Western Great Lakes (Other Keyword)
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The late eighteenth-century fur trade in the Western Great Lakes region offers a particular multi-ethnic context in which social relations between Indigenous peoples and men of European or mixed descent were created and negotiated on a daily basis. With his seminal book “The Middle Ground,” Richard White (1991) challenged prior views, often of a Marxist bend, of the fur trade as a strictly colonial endeavor that led to the inevitable acculturation of Native peoples. While the Montreal merchants...
‘Little Hope of Much Trade This Year’: Merchant Capitalism and Community-making in the Late Eighteenth-Century Western Great Lakes Fur Trade (2017)
While the North American Fur Trade has often been examined through economic lenses, scholarship from the 1980s onward has striven to demonstrate that this colonial phenomenon was more than mere trade and merchant capitalism: it also embodied a complex web of social relationships and practices that went beyond daily transactions. In this paper, I unpack the ways in which exchanges, of myriad shapes and forms, between Euro-Canadian fur traders and local Indigenous groups in the Western Great Lakes...