The Fur Trade in Canada. 3rd ed.

J.R. Miller is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada, and co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review.

When Harold Innis’s Fur Trade appeared in 1930, it was both impressive
in its scope and radical in its implications. Besides surveying the vast
panorama of the commerce in fur pelts from earliest French contact, the
volume contradicted contemporary beliefs that Canada’s
transcontinental configuration was an attempt to defy geography. “The
present Dominion,” wrote Innis, “emerged not in spite of geography
but because of it. The significance of the fur trade consisted in its
determination of the geographical framework.” The monumental economic
history was also novel, to historians at least, in its emphasis on such
arcane topics as the overhead costs created by the natural
characteristics of fur-bearing animals. For a long time The Fur Trade in
Canada has been regarded as no longer serving contemporary scholarly
interests because of its neglect of Native peoples, who of course
caught, processed, and traded most of the pelts that made up the
Canadian fur trade.

The last point is highlighted by Arthur J. Ray, the distinguished
historian and author of Indians in the Fur Trade (1998) from the
University of British Columbia, in his informative introduction to this
third edition of Innis’s work. Ray situates Innis and his scholarship
in a historiographical framework made up of relevant scholarship from
the 1920s to the present, bringing out much of the ethnohistorical
potential embedded in Innis’s work, as only a scholar with Ray’s
knowledge of Native people and the commerce in furs could.

This new edition, especially as enriched by Ray’s introduction,
demonstrates anew that The Fur Trade in Canada, while no doubt
controversial, remains in some respects highly relevant to Canadian
scholarship in the 21st century.