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The Hudson's Bay Company and its critics in the eighteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Glyndwr Williams
Affiliation:
Queen Mary College, London

Extract

As the Hudson's Bay Company prepares to celebrate its tercentenary it is not mere academic perverseness which prompts a paper on a period in the Company's history when it was threatened with extinction. Longevity has its own fascination, and crucial in the story of the Company's growth into one of the great business enterprises of the modern world was its survival amid the bitter criticism directed at chartered companies in the eighteenth century. Small and apparently vulnerable, it showed unexpected stubbornness in resisting attacks which overwhelmed several of its fellows. The controversies which buffeted the Hudson's Bay Company also help to illuminate those mercantile pressure groups working against monopolies in the mid-eighteenth century, and reveal something of the friction at home which accompanied the steady expansion of British commerce overseas.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1970

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References

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page 152 note 1 HBC A.6/6, fos. 83, 110.

page 152 note 2 HBC A.1/33, fo. 77d.

page 152 note 3 Hudson's Bay had been an active stock only during the 1690's, and its last public quotation was in 1700. The Company's records show that stock transfers in the eighteenth century were arranged privately, and that many of the transfers were from one member of a family to another, or between existing shareholders. See e.g. HBC A.43/4 (Stock Transfer Book, 1730–60).

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page 170 note 5 HBC C.7/13, fo. 1d.

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