Districts Documentation And Population In Ruperts Land 1740 1840

This book interrogates how districts were used in British North America to inspect, and document indigenous people by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In particular, it examines how the HBC utilized districts to create a political geography that allowed for closer surveillance of indigenous people and stabilized debt. An initial examination of how the district was used to rework earlier 18th-century conducts of observation into the more ordered and spatially limited regime of inspection is undertaken, followed by an investigation of how the district became central to the HBC’s efforts to limit the movement of indigenous people, individualize hunters, and spur ‘industriousness’. The book points to how districts became key to a number of colonial projects, laying the infrastructure for the modern reserve system in Canada. In this sense, the book provides a critical genealogy of how the command of space and social vision shaped Canada’s colonial geography.

A vital part of A Country So Interesting are the annotated catalogues of all the maps known to have been produced by the Hudson's Bay Company: 838 maps and 557 sketches. While most are in the Company's archives in Manitoba, Ruggles has tracked down maps in other collections, particularly in various libraries in London, England. Also included are sixty-six reproductions of the most important maps and map details.

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.

The purpose of this report is to describe the fur trade that took place at Grand Portage between Europeans and Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this period Grand Portage was important for many reasons. A strategic geographical point in the trade route between the Great Lakes and the Canadian Northwest, it was best known as a trade depot and company headquarters in the period between 1765 and 1804.