Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson's Bay Company, 1770-1879

Barry M. Gough is a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University
and the author of The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and
Discoveries to 1812 and First Across the Continent.

This book is fundamentally important to Canadian fur-trade and labor
history. In researching it, Dr. Burley painstakingly combed through the
principal Hudson’s Bay Company Archives to ferret out all the key
documents of labor-management relations. She also frames the issues well
and purposefully constitutes her narrative in a careful and
comprehensive whole.

The servants of the HBC were just that— servants—in name and fact.
But they did have a lot of influence on their modes of employment, and
the Company was not unmindful of their requirements and needs. The
Vancouver Island material is of particular value, and the author
provides an even-handed account of the labor aspects of the mining and
shipping difficulties that made Fort Rupert such a flashpoint in 1849.
But this is not the only area of her concern, for this survey, which
will become a classic reference, covers many significant events in the
years (particularly the latter ones) of the HBC’s remarkable influence
in the Canadian northwest.