Normally, any discussion of the fur trade is segregated from the wider spectrum of social relations and exchanges between Indians and whites. Yet the exchange of goods is not so easily fenced off into an economic realm whose rules are at once distinct from other aspects of life and present in all societies. After all, goods changed hands virtually every time Frenchmen and Algonquians struggled to unite against common enemies; or met to resolve the murders between them; or asked for aid in surviving hunger, disease, droughts, and blizzards; or made love or married. Such exchanges normally either are excluded from considerations of the fur trade or are reduced to a purely economic relation. It is just as possible, however, to create a counter-image in which the fur trade proper is merely an arbitrary selection from a fuller and quite coherent spectrum of exchange that was embedded in particular social relations. The fur trade was a constantly changing compromise, a conduit, between two local models of the exchange - the French and the Algonquian.

In part, the counter-image presented in this chapter reenters on the side of the substantivists the old, and now tired, debate between substantivists and formalists, between local formulations of “economy” and universal models.