Natural born merchants. The Hudson Bay Company, science and Canada’s final fur frontiers (1925–1931)

Abstract

This article explores the use of science and technology of the Hudson Bay Company, by examining the company’s development department (1925–1931). It focuses, first, on the cooperation between the development department and the renowned animal ecologist Charles Elton. Scientific practices of the department were also instrumental in supporting the company’s expansive strategy, of finding and commercialising Canada’s Arctic north. While the department remained short-lived, the article largely affirms the general view that science and technology played a minor role for trading companies. Yet it gives us a much better understanding of precisely why such a connection is difficult. The case also illustrates that scientific practices could and did play a role for trading companies, and had a specific value in modernising and expanding trade operations. Especially so in organising new supply chains in remote and new territory, and not only to support diversification operations, as it is usually argued.

Keywords:

• Science and technology
• Hudson Bay Company
• Arctic
• fur trade
• product development

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marten Boon, Espen Storli and the other participants of the workshop on multinational trading companies (Trondheim 9 March, 2018), my colleague Violet Pouillard and the reviewers, for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robrecht Declercq

Robrecht Declercq is a postdoctoral researcher of the research foundation Flanders (FWO), attached to the History Department at the Ghent University. Declercq finished in 2015 his Phd at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2016 he was finalist of the Dissertation Award of the EBHA. His main interests are in business and economic history, examining the history of commodity frontiers and natural resource exploitation in the nineteenth and twentieth century. His Phd has recently been published as book: World Market Transformation: Inside the German Fur Capital Leipzig, New York: Routledge, 2017.