Arthur Ray – författare

Throughout most of the pre-confederation period the fur trade dominated the life of Indians and Europeans alike. Arthur Ray’s earlier book, Indians in the Fur Trade, studied the role of the Indians as they responded to the changing environmental and economic conditions between 1660 and 1870. ‘Give Us Good Measure’ concentrates on the early contact between the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay Company. It offers a path-breaking analysis of the differing European and Indian economic customs and the ways in which the two cultural groups accommodated their differences in order to establish a long-lasting partnership. The authors also examine the way in which the partnership responded to changing economic conditions around Hudson Bay.The book’s approach is innovative in several ways. Extensive use is made of Hudson’s Bay Company business records, little-studied sources which have proved to be highly illuminating. The data have been subjected to a variety of statistical treatments in an effort to obtain new understandings of the economic behaviour of European and Indian traders alike. In assessing their findings, the authors consider whether models drawn from comparative economics, economic anthropology, and economic geography provide any new and useful insights into trading relations that developed between European and Indians before 1763. The book’s clear focus and wide-ranging perspective result in a fresh and important reassessment of early Canadian history.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century the Hudson's Bay Company had a virtual monopoly on the core area of the fur trade in Canada. Its products were the object of intense competition among merchants on two continents – in Leipzig, New York, London, Winnipeg, St Louis, and Montreal. But in 1870 things began to change, and by the end of the Second World War the company's share had dropped to about a quarter of the trade. Arthur Ray explores the decades of transition, the economic and technological changes that shaped them, and their impact on the Canadian north and its people.Among the developments that affected the fur trade during this period were innovations in transportation and communication; increased government involvement in business, conservation, and native economic welfare; and the effects of two severe depressions (1873-95 and 1929-38) and two world wars.The Hudson's Bay Company, confronting the first of these changes as early as 1871, embarked on a diversification program that was intended to capitalize on new economic opportunities in land development, retailing, and resource ventures. Meanwhile it continued to participate in its traditional sphere of operations. But the company's directors had difficulty keeping pace with the rapid changes that were taking place in the fur trade, and the company began to lose ground.Ray's study is the first to make extensive use of the Hudson's Bay Company archives dealing with the period between 1870 and 1945. These and other documents reveal a great deal about the decline of the company, and thus about a key element in the history of the modern Canadian fur trade.

First published in 1974, this best-selling book was lauded by Choice as 'an important, ground-breaking study of the Assiniboine and western Cree Indians who inhabited southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan' and 'essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Canadian west before 1870.' Indians in the Fur Trade makes extensive use of previously unpublished Hudson's Bay Company archival materials and other available data to reconstruct the cultural geography of the West at the time of early contact, illustrating many of the rapid cultural transformations with maps and diagrams. Now with a new introduction and an update on sources, it will continue to be of great use to students and scholars of Native and Canadian history.