The opening years of the seventeenth century saw several companies awarded royal charters to found the first colonies of English North America: the Virginia Company in 1606, the Plymouth Company in 1606, the Newfoundland Company in 1610, the Somers Isles Company in 1615, the Council for New England in 1620, the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, and the Providence Island Company in 1630. Except for the latter two chartered under King Charles I, this flurry began with King James I. The towering significance of the Hudson's Bay Company in what became western Canada would begin some generations later, after the English Civil War (1642–51), with its 1670 royal charter issued by King Charles II. Charters were more extensive than patents in that they conveyed both rights over land and governance.

The early seventeenth century was largely associated with indenture and serfdom for skilled and agrarian work. The gentry was a formidable political class. The monarchy was forced to navigate uneasy relations with Parliament and suffered difficulties in raising revenue and maintaining allegiance. The merchant class was embryonic, mainly tied to guilds and regulated trade, cloth being England's central export. Overseas voyages were typically ones of “exploration” (privateering), with mercantilism dictating a pessimistic view of international exchange given the associated depletion of gold bullion from national reserves. By the middle of the seventeenth century, England was in civil war and Charles I had been executed. At the end of the century, the monarchy was restored, the Glorious Revolution united bourgeois interests and created a new foundation of state power epitomized by the creation of the Bank of England (1694) and the London Stock Exchange (1698).

Once colonies were created to support exploration, trade, and settlement, history took a turn and the legacy of joint-stock royal charter companies in English North America began to extend far beyond commerce at the shore given their role in extended forms of settler colonial governance (Craven 1964). Extra-economic motivations expanded colony-making to meeting domestic interests like ridding England of its “offals” by exporting orphans, vagabonds, and other undesirables from the realm (Walsh 2010; Mancall 1995). Later in the seventeenth century, joint-stock royal charter companies were formed to monopolize the African slave trade (French 2021). Creators of states and markets, colonizing companies not only received land rights enabling the dispossession of Indigenous territory, within-colony the companies themselves created legal, governmental, and economic structures to dole out substantial acreages to investors and settler laborers through patents and subdivisions as unique forms of proprietary settler colonialism. Orchestrated by companies as law-makers and political units, their corporate activities laid the groundwork for the royal colonies and sovereign states that would follow. In short, colonizing companies had a very big impact on transatlantic political economy and settler colonialism far beyond the timeframe between being chartered and being dissolved.

The activities of joint-stock royal charter companies like the Hudson's Bay Company and Virginia Company were nothing short of foundational for North American political economy, implicated as they were in dynamics of land, labor, and capital. These companies formulated their own laws and governance structures, created a workforce, and organized relations of private property as risk-taking and market-monopolizing financiers, merchants, and export–import traders.

Evidenced through the company colony cases in this book, proprietary settler colonialism is expressed as political, economic, labor, and legal forms, with racialized aspects throughout. Manifest distinctions worthy of a modified moniker (“proprietary”) include: the simultaneously fractured (Crown-company) and fused (political-economic) nature of formal governance, the unfree condition of settler labor, the highly commercialized orientation of the colony, and the adaptation of feudal law to simplify economic development. John Locke's famous late-seventeenth-century theory of property and private land appropriation described the Christian God as “[giving] the World to Men in Common,” but surmised “it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (Locke 1690, Chapter V, Of Property, section 34). A justificatory logic common to proprietary settler colonialism, Locke's interpretation of divine will transcended the ages, influencing discourse across centuries and coercive treatment of an uncultivated “wild Indian, who knows no enclosure” (Locke 1690, Chapter V, Of Property, section 26) and a bonded English underclass composing the workforce of company colonies.

The activities and powers of company colonies offer another angle on the more typical focus in the critical literature on settler colonialism characterized by a militarized sovereign domestic or imperial state imposing western law, values, and forms of landownership and production on racialized populations through enslavement, extermination, and dispossession (Coulthard 2014; Englert 2020; Ford 2010; Hall 2014; Hixson 2013; King 2019; MacMillan 2012; Reid & Peace 2017; Tomiak 2017; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006).

It passed without mention, the cataclysm that was to forever transform life on the northern prairie and later coastal ways west of the Rockies. England's oldest newspaper, The London Gazette, was silent on the land grant of 2 May 1670 that made corporate monopoly investors “true and absolute lords and proprietors” of Rupert's Land in perpetuity; the journal of record opted instead to report on ships at Hull freighted with wine and prunes from Bordeaux, laden with thread and cloth for Amsterdam and Hamburg (London Gazette 1670a). Ricardian trade, ever newsworthy for its mutually advantages, illustrates perfectly, if not anachronistically, the narrow mercantile lens through which the Hudson's Bay Company has been often (mis)understood. As Fitzgerald (1849: 135–6) described some time ago, the Hudson's Bay Company was seen by many as “a despotism, whose severity no legislative control can mitigate, and no public opinion restrain. It knows but one limit, and obeys but one law – ‘Put money in thy purse’,” the latter in reference to a famous line from Shakespeare's tragedy Othello.

A royal charter empowering a joint-stock company to engage in overseas trade was nothing new, by the late seventeenth century England had seen dozens come and go – Virginia, Plymouth, Somers Isles, Massachusetts Bay, Newfoundland Companies and many more the same had all left their mark on the New World, although most were long since defunct (see Chapters 1 and 2; Whiteside 2022). A week after the Hudson's Bay charter was granted, The London Gazette reported on tobacco arriving from Virginia at Plymouth (London Gazette 1670b). The newspaper is mute here too on the corporate connection, although for our purposes it is noteworthy that tobacco was first planted by the Virginia Company at its privately-owned Jamestown colony, an English company colony directed by Plymouth's merchant investors.

GOVERNANCE FORMS

Charter

Royal charter granted for “Rupert's Land” (1670) covering all rivers and lakes draining into Hudson's Bay (unmapped), totalling 3.9 million square kilometers, ranging from Labrador in the northeast to the prairies in the southwest. HBC granted the right to make laws, monopolize trade, enforce penalties, set up colonies. 18 original investors listed, some of whom had financed the pre-Charter voyage of the Nonsuch (1668).

Until 1931, the London head office (“London Committee”) was the centre of Company activity. The Governor and Committee finalized all decisions on North American matters through appointed overseas governors and commissioners.

Under the direction of the Virginia Company armed with its royal charter, a couple hundred settlers made up of investors and indentured servants landed in Powhatan territory at Chesapeake Bay in 1607, sailed up the river, planted a cross, and built a fort to ward off the locals, naming it Jamestown in honor of their English king. Eight years later, in 1615, the Virginia Company's flagship Sea Venture was destined for Jamestown but ran aground, inspiring the shipwreck in the opening scene of Shakespeare's The Tempest, from which we get the chapter's title “A plague upon this howling” (Act 1, Scene 1). Disaster paved the way for 60 years of corporate political and economic control of Bermuda, importing unfree labor to collect its pearls and cultivate its tobacco. The Somers Isles Company, as it was then called, connected the archipelago to the Virginia mainland, and, through their shared joint-stock investors, they too were linked to several other contemporaneous company colonies in Newfoundland, New England, and Providence Island. Disaster might also be an apt term for describing the experience of settler migrants, stockholders, and Indigenous peoples dealing from the fallout and follies of early Jamestown, with disease, starvation, penury, and land encroachment all characterizing the opening years of the colony.

Down the eastern American seaboard from the north Atlantic to the Caribbean, English colonial territory in the New World was acquired not only through brazen military conquest, but also, initially, through the more surreptitious granting of royal charters to joint-stock companies for trade, settlement, and law-making. New World colonial companies propelled feudal-mercantilism across the sea, settling territory at a time of incoherence in the not-yet-sovereign European state system and during England's especially turbulent seventeenth century.

1849–62 HBC established Nanaimo Coal Company and the new colony of Fort Rupert to provide coal for bunkering vessels used in the HBC fur trade. In 1862, HBC sold the Nanaimo mines to James Nichol, who then established the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company.

1869 Under the Deed of Surrender, the HBC received ￡300,000 ($1.5 million) in cash, and was granted one-twentieth of all the lands in the “Fertile Belt,” as well as 50,000 acres around the company's posts, for a total of approximately 7 million acres of land. 1872 HBC Land Department organized.

1875–76 HBC considered selling back its land to Canada for ￡550,000, but the Canadian cabinet was unwilling to accept the deal and the HBC was obliged to keep the land.

1880s HBC was granted 3,000 acres around Edmonton for a previous trade post, and in 1881 announced the creation of the City of Edmonton advertised as a centre of gold, coal, timber and minerals, richest wheat producing country, and projected Saskatchewan branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Understanding the track record and implications of joint-stock royal charter companies in English North America are the subject of this book. The book develops an analysis centered on “proprietary settler colonialism,” uncovering the formative role of company colonies in the making of North American settler capitalism. Sates and economies that emerged through proprietary settler colonialism were based historically on specific forms of private landownership from which flowed propertied politics, economics, governance, and law. The conceptual framework of proprietary settler colonialism features both processes and institutions. In the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, processes included the legal devices that commercialized land and tethered indentured servitude and share purchases to landownership through the simplification of tenure rights out of older feudal arrangements. Institutions included the political-economic arrangements that centered stockholders’ decision-making and exclusionary trade and agricultural practices at the heart of the private, propertied, and racialized colonial state.

The political, legal, labor, and economic transformations encompassed under the umbrella of proprietary settler colonialism were of a liminal and contested nature. Company colonies, landownership, and emergent notions of property are evidenced through investors seeking revenue by owning and governing land in the “New World” of English North America at its Atlantic coast (Virginia) and western frontier (Rupert's Land).

Recollections of a provincial childhood on the cusp of Empire. There were hints of turpentine and creosote as you entered the dimly lit replica of the proto-Hudson's Bay Company 1668 Nonsuch ketch at Winnipeg's Museum of Man and Nature. Up the highway from the museum located at the heart of Red River colony, the Company's 1830 Lower Fort Garry (now a National Historical Site) celebrated mercantile exchange in the hinterland. The sound of a blacksmith hammering an ancient custom, cool inside the warped wood one- and two-story houses crouched near the Red River flowing to the inland Arctic Sea. Continental connector, oceanic in its implications. It was never made entirely clear why a Company fort had ramparts and ammunition batteries. To extirpate the beaver, or were others also the target? The end of one way of life and the start of another, but not so long ago and far away.

In writing this book, I aim to provide a different view of the Company, beyond mercantile, not only provincial, not just the intrepid explorers and fur traders of yesteryear. For Manitoba's history, like that of Western Canada more generally, the Hudson's Bay Company was the founder of settler colonial capitalism in the nineteenth century. This book is about corporate landownership as crucible for the creation of proprietary colonies as new sites of settler labor, government, and economy rooted in emergent property relations.

On 28 March 2024, the Haida Nation and province of British Columbia came to an agreement 20 years in the making (or 200 years, as we shall see). The draft agreement (BC 2024a), to be finalized through the courts in 2026, confers “Aboriginal title” to the archipelago of Haida Gwaii situated almost 1,000 kilometers north of what was once the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Victoria and 1,600 kilometres south of Alaska. Spotted by late-eighteenth-century explorers like Captain James Cook, it was dubbed the Queen Charlotte Islands and claimed as a British royal colony in 1851 to thwart American gold prospectors. In the 1850s, James Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Company, governor of Vancouver Island, was appointed to effectively govern both colonies together, which by the 1860s had merged with the mainland to form the Colony of British Columbia. In 1871, British Columbia joined Canada. “The Charlottes” were renamed Haida Gwaii in 2010 as part of the reconciliation process, acknowledging the Haida Indigenous peoples who have made a home of the islands for nearly 13,000 years.

The 2024 draft agreement imparting Aboriginal title over the entire archipelago represents a negotiated agreement where the First Nation will officially (re)gain land title and expanded rights and jurisdiction over land governance. One thorny issue for capitalism, and for those opposed to reconciliation through land title transfer, is the matter of private property, fee simple land title being quite different from collective ownership as Aboriginal title (discussed further below).

It all started in a much different time for empire, one that for England was pre-industrial, mid-mercantilist, and late feudal. The London Stock Exchange was almost 100 years away, purchasing company shares meant buying subscriptions in joint-stock ventures linked to towns, merchant associations, or guilds. English fields were not yet fully enclosed, and about half of its historic peasant caste still toiled on the same land as their forefathers. Health and illness were measured by the four humors. Shakespeare's Hamlet had just been staged. Company-owned colonies of English North America emerged within this early seventeenth-century context, namely those owned and created by the Virginia and Plymouth Companies (1606), Newfoundland Company (1610), Somers Isles Company (1615), Council for New England (1620), Massachusetts Bay Company (1629), and Hudson's Bay Company (1670).

Far from antique oddities or obscure trivia, company colonies are significant in ways both theoretical and political today. The origin story of North American capitalism must include an understanding of the law-making and legislatures of for-profit colonial stockholders, corporate initiatives to found settlements on common company ownership of staple exports (like tobacco, fur, and sugarcane), provisions for indentured labor indexed to race, and commercial treaty-making with Indigenous peoples. North American proto-capitalist states and markets emerged as real estate transactions. Way before the British red coats, company estates were developed for commodity production and trade through royal charter-enabled land grants for huge swathes of unmapped and unceded territory.

VIRGINIA COMPANY (SOUTHERN VIRGINIA, AKA COMPANY OF LONDON)

“The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia”

1606 First royal charter (a public–private partnership governed by a royal council), a double charter with the Plymouth Company covering 34°–45°N latitude, or the Atlantic coast of America to the western sea, with Virginia south of 41°N at Chesapeake Bay and Plymouth north in New England.

1607 First ships reach Chesapeake, establish Jamestown colony as company property.

1609 Second royal charter (reorganized, reconstituted as a joint-stock company), granted seacoast of America 200 miles north and 200 miles south of Point Comfort, and all islands lying within 100 miles. Hundreds of investors listed as part of the company.

1610 “Starving time” 400 died, only 60 colonists remain.

1610 Martial law enacted.

This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” as a powerful expression of ecological concern shaped by the poet’s long-standing engagement with industrial modernity. Building on earlier works such as “Howl,” Ginsberg’s poem intensifies his critique of environmental degradation, using vivid language and mythic imagery to address the ethical and existential implications of nuclear technology. I trace the evolution of Ginsberg’s ecological thought, arguing that “Plutonian Ode” reflects Ginsberg’s deepening awareness of humanity’s complex relationship with nature and technology. The poem’s fragmented form mirrors the disorientation of nuclear threat, while its ritualistic references reframe technological advancement as both reverent and destructive. Drawing on ecocritical frameworks, the chapter highlights how Ginsberg positions poetry as a vehicle for reflection and resistance. Rather than offering simple solutions, “Plutonian Ode” invites readers to consider the long-term impact of environmental decisions and to reflect on the responsibilities shared in an increasingly uncertain ecological future.