Master and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668–1786

by Scott P. Stephen University of Alberta Press, 448 pages, $27.95

In Masters and Ser

vants, Parks Canada historian Scott Stephen examines how the Hudson’s Bay Company constructed its labour force during the firm’s “long first century,” when the HBC largely consisted of a handful of modest bayside posts on the eastern rim of the vast area known as Rupert’s Land that had been granted to the company as its exclusive trading domain.

In its early decades, the HBC took its servants where it could find them, and recruitment remained improvisational even after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht between Britain and France had initiated a period of relative stability. HBC eventually found a reliable supply of able (and cheap) labour in the Orkney Islands, the last port of call before company ships crossed the Atlantic. Standard five-year contracts with a sliding salary became the norm. The hiring of French Canadians was generally avoided, while Charles Price Isham was a rare case of the son of an HBC employee and an Indigenous mother who had a significant career in the firm.

HBC posts were really an extension of early modern Britain, Stephen argues, and are best understood as microcosms of that strictly hierarchical society. On Hudson Bay, as in Britain, the dominant mode of economic and social organization was the household, which bonded all of its members under a patriarchal and paternalistic regime of masters and servants. This thesis is especially convincing when we compare the trading posts to larger British estates. One can easily substitute the HBC committee for the estate owner, the