American Colonies: The Settling of North America

Chapter 5 shifts to the northeast, where the English, Dutch, and French established colonies in what is now Canada and Acadia. While the Spanish dominated the land and trade routes to the south, the north remained open but did not have a good growing season for tropical crops. Furs, on the other hand, could be hunted year-round and were in high demand in Europe (94).

The logistics of the fur trade explain key differences in how natives were treated in the north versus the south. First, it was more profitable to allow Indians to do the hard work of obtaining and processing furs than to enslave them for other purposes (94). This led to a more equitable playing field between Europeans and Indians, and in turn a complex mutual dependency, as “the Canadian French could not afford to bully, dispossess, or enslave the Indians, needing them instead to persist as suppliers of furs” (101). Second, as the European traders preferred to keep their own numbers low for profitability, they depended on the goodwill of their Indian allies to avoid being killed by their enemies (92; 101).

For the Indians, the utility of European goods (metal tools, guns, etc.) led to the abandoning of traditional stone tools and the knowledge needed to create them, meaning the Indians would need to continue trading with the Europeans or face starvation or annihilation by their better-armed enemies (97).