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Frontiers and Forms of Enterprise: The Case of The North Pacific, 1785–1825*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
Despite the considerable influence exercised on North American historians by what Professor Careless has called “frontierism,” those who have dealt with the early history of the North Pacific have been almost unanimous in finding in metropolitan institutions the key to developments in that area. The usual interpretation is based on the hypothesis of a sharp competition for the North Pacific trade in furs between various forms of enterprise, each of which mirrored the institutions of the metropolis which had spawned it—a semi-government Russian corporation, government-directed Spanish enterprise (or lack of it), British enterprise almost hopelessly handicapped by obsolete trad¬ing institutions, and unrestricted (free) Yankee enterprise, with an occasional genuflection towards a similarly “free” enterprise based on Montreal but handicapped by the British connection. In that competition, it is alleged, the handicaps of government regulation precluded successful Russian, Spanish, or British competition with the “free enterprise” of the New Englander, and this, coupled with his superior resourcefulness and shrewdness—by-products, apparently, of the institutions of his particular metropolis—enabled him to dominate the North Pacific trade in furs.
While this interpretation may “validate the status” of one metropolis and at the same time “denigrate that of others”—the purpose, Leach suggests,2 of national myths and legends—it appears to be founded on caricatures of the forms of enterprise there, and on some lack of appreciation of the global setting in which the trade was carried on. Those caricatures, it would seem, derive from a focusing of attention on particular, and allegedly deplorable, elements of the metropolitanism of Spain or Russia or Britain, and from the assumption that, despite the remoteness of the frontier, those elements com¬pletely dominated the enterprise of the various competitors. The failure to achieve a proper perspective of the place of the North Pacific in the overseas thrust of European powers probably derives from a lack of appreciation of ends other than business profits and of the existence of alternative oppor¬tunities for such profits.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , May 1958 , pp. 251 - 261
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1958
Footnotes
*
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Ottawa, June 14, 1957.
References
1 See Careless, J. M. S., “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review, XXXV, no. 1, 03, 1954, 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See Leach, E. R., Political Systems of Highland Burma (London, 1954).Google Scholar
3 ”Spain conceived and wrote the most humane and elevated legislation for inferior peoples which is known to history”: y Crevea, Altamira, “Spain in the History of the Pacific Ocean” in Stephens, H. Morse and Bolton, Herbert E., eds., The Pacific Ocean in History (New York, 1917), 48.Google Scholar See also Schwarzman, M., “Background Factors in Spanish Decline” (unpublished MS, Dept. of Political Economy, University of Toronto).Google Scholar
4 See Fisher, R. H., The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700 (Berkeley, Calif., 1943), 77.Google Scholar For details of official Moscow policy see 74 ff.
5 The Country Trade was the trade carried on between India and China “by English¬men resident in India under the licence of the Company and by native Indian merchants.” See Pritchard, E. H., The Crucial Years of Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1750–1800, Research Studies of the State College of Washington, IV, nos. 3–4 (Pullman, Wash., 09, Dec., 1936), 142.Google Scholar The chief items imported to Canton were raw cotton, tin, pepper, and opium (ibid., 175). While sugar, sugar candy, tea, and alum were exported to India from Canton, the Country Trade almost invariably yielded a surplus of Canton funds which were paid into the company’s Canton treasury in exchange for bills on Bombay, Calcutta, and London. Statistics pertaining to this trade are given in ibid., App. x, 400, and App. xii, 402. The great increase between 1785 and 1800 in the Canton demand for raw cotton was no doubt due, in part, to the increased demand by Europeans and Americans for cotton goods, but it is not improbable that the opportunity to expand sales of raw cotton had previously been neglected.
6 Greenberg, Michael, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–1842 (Cambridge, 1951).Google Scholar
7 The Teast interests in Britain long carried on a “legal” and apparently profitable trade on such terms.
8 See Muir, Ramsay, Short History of the British Commonwealth (London, 1922), II, 139.Google Scholar
9 See Gayer, A. D., Rostov, W. W., and Schwartz, A. J., The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy (Oxford, 1953), I, 8.Google Scholar
10 See Berkh, Vasili, Chronological History of the Discovery of the Aleutian Islands (St. Petersburg, 1823), tr. Krenov, Dimitri (Seattle, 1938), 15–16, 83–84, 87.Google Scholar
11 The navigator was usually also the captain.
12 In the eighteenth century this would represent substantial wealth. As late as 1786 native labour was paid R60 a year and a clerk of the ability of Korobitsyn was paid R200 a year. Sometimes a bonus was voted by the others to a hunter who had distinguished himself in the hunt.
13 See Tompkins, S. R., “After Behring: Mapping the North Pacific” (unpublished MS, Provincial Archives, Victoria, B.C.), 2.Google Scholar This article will be published in British Columbia Historical Quarterly, XIX.
14 Quotations in this paragraph are from the by-laws of the company. See Tikhmenev, P., Historical Review of the Formation of the Russian-American Company, tr. Krenov, Dimitri (Seattle, 1939), I, Supplements, 33–46.Google Scholar
15 For Strange’s suggestions see his letter of Feb., 1788, to Hon. Major General Sir Archibald Campbell, “Sentiments on the Trade to the North West Coast of America” in Great Britain, India Office, Madras Records, Madras Public Proceedings, range 241, vol. LIH, pp. 602–19 (transcript, Provincial Archives, Victoria, B.C., file AA 10G 79M, no. 1). For Shelekhov’s suggestions see his memorandum of 1787 on the privileges of his company in Andreyev, A. I., ed., Russian Discoveries in the Pacific and in North America during the Eighteenth and ‘Nineteenth Centuries, tr. Ginsberg, Carl (Ann Arbor, 1952), 81 ff.Google Scholar Both Strange and Shelekhov were convinced that North Pacific trade in furs could not be carried on successfully, or for long, as a mere extension of unregulated Asian (or European) enterprise.
16 Boulding, K. E., “In Defence of Monopoly,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LIX, 08, 1944–1945, 529.Google Scholar
17 Bladen, Vincent, Competition and Monopoly and Their Regulation in Canada, a sub¬mission to the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, 4.Google Scholar
18 By 1785 individual Russian enterprise in the North Pacific had come to a virtual standstill.
19 See Slichter, Sumner H., “The Passing of Keynesian Economics,” Atlantic (100th anniversary ed.), 11, 1957, 142, 143.Google Scholar Slichter is, of course, merely repeating what the proponents of scientific and industrial research have been saying, in somewhat different terms, for the past century.