Capitalism has a troublesome history. That word—“troublesome”—is the sign under which Susan Dianne Brophy organizes her study of the Red River Colony, a settlement founded in 1811 through a land grant from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). The colony is troublesome, as Brophy notes, for the sometimes “inscrutable” forms of exploitation and dispossession that define its origins (178). But it is troublesome, too, for the history of capitalism. The colony’s history, she contends, disrupts dominant accounts of the transition to capitalism.
Across its six chapters, A Legacy of Exploitation takes this trouble head-on. Deploying the lens of dialectical materialism and emphasizing the years from 1810 to 1816, Brophy finds that Red River Colony does not fit with any transition narrative that moves from “violent chaos to peaceful order” (10). Yet in her analysis, the absence of the “direct, violent extra-economic force” in the fur trade that characterizes precapitalist labor compulsion...
