6 ideas
A colonial economy organizes itself around extracting and exporting one raw commodity to an industrial centre, and that staple's traits (bulk, perishability, location, seasonality) decide the shape of its transport, settlement, finance and government. Because the periphery specializes in raw materials and imports manufactures, its economic rhythm and political loyalties stay tied to the centre that buys the staple and supplies the goods.
Beaver breed slowly and are easily trapped out, so each trapping region was exhausted within decades and traders were forced ever farther west and north. Every push lengthened supply lines, raising transport costs and capital requirements, so the depletion of a renewable resource worked like a ratchet on the geography and cost structure of the whole enterprise.
Canada's shape reflects the canoe routes of the fur trade through the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes and Precambrian Shield drainage systems, not a political accident drawn across the continent's north–south grain. Seen this way, the country exists because of its geography: an east–west trade network along rivers and lakes laid down the boundary that later governments ratified.
Moving goods thousands of miles by canoe and boat imposed heavy fixed and overhead costs that small, competing traders could not carry for long. Competition therefore tended to turn ruinous, with violence, overtrading and debauching of Indigenous suppliers, until firms merged into large monopolies with centralized control, often backed by state charters.
The Montreal-based North West Company ran a brilliant but very long canoe brigade system from the St. Lawrence to the Athabasca country, while the Hudson's Bay Company reached the same interior by ship through the Bay at far lower cost. As the trade moved deeper into the northwest, the Montreal route's cost burden became unsustainable, which ended in the 1821 merger and the diversion of the trade away from the St. Lawrence.
Indigenous peoples eagerly traded furs for European iron tools, kettles, guns and cloth, and in doing so gradually lost the skills and self-sufficiency of their older technologies. That growing dependence on imported goods locked them into supplying furs and made them the trade's essential labour force, while European traders relied in turn on Indigenous knowledge such as the birchbark canoe and pemmican.