An outsider’s perspective

GUEST POST: What we learnt from our comparison of Indigenous nations contact with Europeans in the Cape of Good Hope and Hudson Bay

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Some time ago, we were asked if we would like to explore, along with Erik Green and Cal Links, the similarities and contrasts in two trading environments – the interaction of the Khoe with the Vereenigde Oostindische Companie (VOC) and the interaction of the Cree with the Hudson’s Bay Company.  The result of that exploration, “Early Modern Globalization and the Extent of Indigenous Agency: Trade, Commodities, and Ecology”, is forthcoming in the Economic History Review.  While each set of authors was bringing particular expertise to the table, the final product was something much richer and broader than our initial conception of a simple compare and contrast. Here we talk about the ‘lessons’ we, as scholars of Indigenous North America, learned; both those we see as generally applicable when thinking and writing about these early colonial interactions but also what we learned from the Cape Colony that we could apply to North America or more broadly.

Just a short historical note to begin. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) received a royal charter in 1680 to trade for furs, especially beaver pelts, throughout the drainage basin of Hudson Bay, Canada; a drainage basin (unbeknown at the time) that stretches to the Rocky Mountains. The HBC built posts along the shore and waited for Indigenous traders. The VOC was chartered in 1600 to trade for spices and other products in southeast Asia, a sea route made possible after the great voyages of discovery in the late 1400s; a route that would eventually replace the overland Silk Road. But the sea route was arduous, and eventually the VOC built a permanent refreshment station that became the Cape Colony.

Lessons 1 - Collapsing history.  This comparison highlighted for us the way in which we, as economic historians, often ‘collapse history’. Contact between Indigenous nations and Europeans, whether in the Americas, Africa or Australia, left those Indigenous communities severely disadvantaged in the long term – low per capita incomes, lower educational attainment, lower health outcomes, for example. Yet we tacitly assume that this was always so – assuming Indigenous culture, technology and knowledge inferior to European and so we begin with a Eurocentric view of history.   Additionally, historical narratives generally start when Europeans built their first structure – factory, post, refreshment centre. 

Lesson 2 – Intermittent Contact. Our attempts to be less Eurocentric led us to think about the world that immediately preceded a post and to ask when contact between Indigenous nations and Europeans actually started: for southern Africa, this was when that first ship dropped anchor in 1490. Similarly, in Canada, first contact was between fishing vessels on the Grand Banks off Nova Scotia and New England shortly after John Cabot’s voyages in the 1490s. We were struck by the significance of these decades of early Indigenous/European contact and how these intermittent interactions provided the possibility of learning opportunities for all parties. One example is language and the totally different attitudes of the HBC and the VOC towards learning local languages: the HBC sought employees with some language skills and expected its traders to learn Cree, making Cree the language of the trade.  The VOC, even after a dictionary was compiled, said that trade had to be conducted in Dutch.

Lesson 3 – Why no law of large numbers? The story of early contact – whether at the Cape or Hudson Bay – involved very few Europeans. Population data are unreliable but indicate low numbers of Europeans either at the Cape or around Hudson Bay.  Another manifestation of reading history backwards is to see these chartered companies as corporate giants. What ultimately became quasi-governmental entities started out very small. For a century after 1680, the HBC had five or seven posts, each with perhaps 40-60 men sitting on the edge of a continent with hundreds of Indigenous nations and more immediately, thousands of Nehiyawak (Cree) on their doorstep. Even when the VOC built its refreshment station on the edge of Khoe territory, the company had a few hundred servants and officials in comparison to a best-estimated population of 50,000 Khoe.

Lesson 4 – To trade or not to trade? The Europeans who laid anchor at the Cape or those who arrived in Canada were looking for local goods. The HBC wanted beaver pelts and furs, the VOC fresh provisions (cattle and sheep) and water for men dangerously ill and weak from the sea journey; goods in seemingly endless supply in the respective places. But the trade outcomes in these two locations are stark. This difference is a puzzle or perhaps we have made it a puzzle. The history of trade between the Cree and the HBC shows that the Cree were interested in particular European goods, and used their agency to obtain what they wanted. The VOC traders spoke of the Khoe not wanting any European goods they offered in trade – and this even after some individuals had been to London and to Batavia and seen goods from multiple nations. Indeed, Noel Butlin (1991) made this same point writing that Aboriginal communities wanted nothing the English offered.

We could see this difference in a couple of ways: were European goods and technology too superior, or did the VOC not try that hard to find goods while the HBC tried very hard? In the context of a trade or bargaining relationship, it is worth remembering that one party can always walk away. If so, what then does the other party do?  Options are to also walk away, to make a more attractive offer, or to steal the resources. There are almost casual assertions of land being granted by the VOC to particular individuals and groups, but little to no discussion of Khoe property rights to their lands. Perhaps in the eighteenth-century world of the Cree/HBC, where land dispossession did not happen, that is unusual.

Lesson 5 – A detour on technology – keep your powder dry.  Because of the highly Eurocentric focus of much that is written, European technology is seen as superior.  The reality is that some were and some weren’t. Guns are an example of where the technology was not. Many state that guns terrified Indigenous communities. This is yet another example of collapsing history.  Guns today are lethal. But in the seventeenth century, guns were muskets, rifles, or pistols; each very inaccurate and unwieldy. A musket was a five or six-foot-long powder-and-shot armament: you had to drop the shot down the barrel, pour in and tap down the powder, then raise and shoot, and then lower, clean, and repeat. Rifles and pistols were flintlocks and needed steel and flint to ignite and took even longer to prime than a musket. It did not take very long for Indigenous communities to get over the sound which also scattered any animals nearby. Traditional technologies of bows and arrows, atlatls and spears were much more lethal. 

Lesson 6– Indigenous agency and political economy.  Ann’s work with Frank Lewis has always highlighted how the Cree had been able to structure the trade with the HBC. Learning about trade between Khoe nations and the VOC gave us a better understanding of the extent of Cree agency. A seeming difference between the trades in the two environments was the relative unity of the Cree which enabled them to extract gains over decades. By contrast, intergroup dynamics amongst Khoe nations eventually ended up weakening their position vis-a-vis the Dutch. 

Seeing the experience of Indigenous peoples in this broader global context drove home the extent to which the history of interaction between Indigenous peoples and Europeans is not a North American story, or indeed an African or an Australian story, but a global one. At the same time, it revealed a number of lessons which we hope to carry forward and puzzles that remain.

‘An outsider’s perspective’ was first published on Our Long Walk. The images were created with Midjourney v6.