James R. Gibson - Böcker

Before contact with white people, the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast traded amongst themselves and with other Indigenous groups farther inland, but by the end of the 1780s, when Russian coasters had penetrated the Gulf of Alaska and British merchantmen were frequenting Nootka Sound, trade had become the dominant economic activity in the area. The Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Nootka, Salish, and Chinook spent much of their time hunting fur-bearing animals and trading their pelts to settler traders for metals, firearms, textiles, and foodstuffs. The Northwest Coast First Nations used their newly acquired goods in intertribal trade while the Euro-American traders dealt their skins in China for teas, silks, and porcelains that they then sold in Europe and America.While previous studies have concentrated on the boom years of the fur trade before the War of 1812, James Gibson reveals that the maritime fur trade persisted into the 1840s and that it was not solely or even principally the domain of American traders. He gives an account of Russian, British, Spanish, and American participation in the Northwest traffic, describes the market in South China, and outlines the evolution of the coast trade, including the means and problems. He also assesses the physical and cultural effects of this trade on the Northwest Coast and Hawaiian Islands and on the industrialization of the New England states.Uncovering many Russian-language sources, Gibson also consulted the records of the Russian-American, East India, and Hudson’s Bay Companies, the unpublished logs and journals of American ships, and the business correspondence of several New England shipowners. No more comprehensive or painstakingly researched account of the maritime fur trade of the Northwest Coast has ever been written.

In the wake of Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, various protagonists grappled to become his successor, but it was not until 1928 that Joseph Stalin emerged as leader of the Russian Marxists’ Bolshevik wing. Surrounded by an increasingly hostile capitalist world, Stalin reasoned that Soviet Russia had to industrialize in order to survive and prosper. But domestic capital was scarce, so the country’s minerals, timber, and grain were sold abroad for hard currency for funding the development of heavy industry.Claiming total control of agricultural management and production, Stalin implemented the collectivization of farming, consolidating small peasant holdings into large collective farms and controlling their output. The program was economically successful, but it came at a high social cost as the state encountered intense resistance, and between 1928 and 1934 collectivization led to the deaths of at least ten million people from starvation and associated diseases. Hungry and Starving elicits the voices of both the culprits and the victims at the centre of this horrific process. Through primary accounts of collectivization as well as the eyewitness observations of ambassadors, reporters, tourists, fellow travellers, Russian emigrés, tsarist officials, aristocrats, scientists, and technical specialists, James Gibson engages the crucial notions and actors in the academic discourse of the period. He finds that the famine lasted longer than is commonly supposed, that it took place on a national rather than a regional scale, and that while the famine was entirely man-made – the result of the ruthless manner in which collectivization was executed and enforced – it was neither deliberate nor ethnically motivated, given that it was not in the Soviet state’s economic or political interest to engage in genocide.Highlighting the experiences of life and death under Stalin’s ruthless regime, Hungry and Starving offers a broader understanding of the Great Soviet Famine.

"Furs is what brings us," remarked an early trader in the Oregon Country, adding, however, that "the difficulty of getting the necessary supplies will continue to operate against it," located as it was, "on the worst side of the Rocky Mountains." Fortunately, the discovery in 1805 by Lewis and Clark that the Columbia River was navigable by canoe or boat to the Pacific led to the logistical linking of the New Caledonia and Columbia Districts by means of the Fraser-Columbia brigade system. First used in 1811 by the North West Company, this transport system of North canoes, Indian pack horses, and Columbia batteaux eventually became the lifeline of the fur trade of the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia Department until 1847, when the route was severed by the extension of the Canada-US border along the forty-ninth parallel to the Pacific.In The Lifeline of the Oregon Country, James Gibson compellingly immerses the reader in one of the most intractable problems faced by the Hudson's Bay Company: how to realize wealth from such a remote and formidable land. The personalities, places, obstacles, and operations involved in the brigade system are all described in fascinating detail, stretch by stretch from Fort St. James, the depot of New Caledonia on the upper reaches of the Fraser River, to Fort Vancouver, the Columbia Department's entrepôt on the lower Columbia River, and back.Never before has such a rich collection of primary information concerning the fur trade supply system and the constraining role of logistics been so meticulously assembled. The Lifeline of the Oregon Country will prove indispensable to historians, researchers, and fur trade enthusiasts alike, and is an important contribution to our understanding of the economic history of the Pacific Slope.

Andrew Hill Clark (1911-1975) was responsible for much of the recent rise of historical geography in North America. The focus on his research was the opening of New World lands by European peoples, and this North American experience is the subject of this collection of essays written by eight of Clark's students. They examine the role of a new physical and economic environment – particularly abundant and cheap land – in the settlement of New France, the cultural and physical problems that conditioned Russian America, the transformation of cultural regionalism in the eastern United States between the late colonial seaboard and the early republican interior, the changing economic geography of rice farming on the antebellum Southern seaboard, the interrelationships of the European and Indian economies in the pre-conquest fur trade of Canada, differential acculturation and ethnic territoriality among three immigrant groups in Kansas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the development in England and the United States of similar social geographic images of the Victorian city, and the erosion of a sense of place and community by possessive individualism in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.The essays are preceded by an appreciation of Clark as an historical geographer written by D.W. Meinig and are brought together in an epilogue by John Warkentin. The work is an unusually consistent Festchrift which should appeal to all interested in the patterns of North American settlement.