Its good overall history of the Hudson Bay company but it could have been so much better if it had been split into a few books and went into more detail of every era.

I learned why Slave Lake in Alberta is called Slave Lake. It is nuts how the company completely changed the social dynamics of the country. Google Death of the Innocents by Kent Monkman. 

The Hudson’s Bay Company and Canadian history more generally is something I’ve been getting really interested in lately and so when I found this book I figured it’d be a decent starting point on the specific subject.

This is certainly well-written - easy to follow and engaging. It writes the history as a sort of narrative with a focus on the major figures involved and their adventures in Canada which I found quite vivid. Of everything in this book the stories of Samuel Hearne/Matonabbee and David Thompson were most memorable and so this book provides good resources into looking deeper into specific case studies like them. Overall this book does a really great job at painting a compelling picture of the history.

However this focus on events/people made this fall a bit flat in terms of actually understanding the capitalistic+colonial ideologies associated with the company that shaped Canada. It tries to present a balanced narrative but I still get the sense that it doesn’t go deep enough. Everything is explained simplistically and it ends on a rather abrupt note - Simpson’s death - which I just don’t feel rings true living in Canada and seeing the influence of the Company continue all around me. The final argument in the book is that "The Company was nothing other than its people and their stories; everything else is now dust" which… nah, not convinced about that lol. I’m also especially skeptical of histories where the negative stuff is blamed on individuals than ideas, and this book essentially lays everything down on George Simpson which again I feel is too simplistic in only going as far as describing the individual but not too much in what makes the individual. The author seems to have the idea that people are always the same throughout history and only the context changes and I don’t quite find that compelling - Who people are are shaped directly by their context. Simpson was a product of his time, if it wasn’t him who disgraced the Company then I’m sure it would have been somebody else. But then again it’s hard to say because the author just doesn’t go much beyond what’s tangible. 

I’ll have to do more reading on the subject for sure to better critique the author’s problematic methodology and thesis but otherwise the narrative history itself is presented fine. A good enough book for beginner’s to get a vivid rundown of the massive topic but not something too intellectually compelling.

Very well written history of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The author included a lot of information about the various Indigenous Peoples who occupied the land and had well established trade before the Company traders arrived.