Districts, Documentation, and Population in Rupert’s Land (1740–1840)

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-v

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 1-4

3. Observational Practices in Natural History: Conducts and Technical Registers (1700–1798)

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 5-36

4. Hudson’s Bay Company’s the Right of Seizure, the Fort, and the Preconditions of District-Inspection

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 37-61

5. The Codification of Natural History: From Observation to Inspection

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 63-90

6. District Space and Productive Labour

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 91-105

7. District Space, Population, and Biopolitics

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 107-126

8. Conclusion: District Space

   • Aaron James Henry

   Pages 127-134

9. Back Matter

   Pages 135-145

   PDF

This book interrogates how districts were used in British North America to inspect, and document indigenous people by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In particular, it examines how the HBC utilized districts to create a political geography that allowed for closer surveillance of indigenous people and stabilized debt. An initial examination of how the district was used to rework earlier 18th-century conducts of observation into the more ordered and spatially limited regime of inspection is undertaken, followed by an investigation of how the district became central to the HBC’s efforts to limit the movement of indigenous people, individualize hunters, and spur ‘industriousness’. The book points to how districts became key to a number of colonial projects, laying the infrastructure for the modern reserve system in Canada. In this sense, the book provides a critical genealogy of how the command of space and social vision shaped Canada’s colonial geography.

• Historical Geography
• USA
• Colonalism
• Hudson's Bay Company
• Canadian Studies
• Indigenous
• Critical Geographies
• area studies

“A strong contribution to genealogical and critical analyses of both colonial power and its geography. The book’s greatest significance lies in its careful delineation of the emerging capitalist order fabricated through the district. It was a tactic of pacification for a new political economy aimed at the dispossession and exploitation of Canada’s indigenous population.” (George S. Rigakos, Professor of the Political Economy of Policing, Carleton University, Canada)

• Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

  Aaron James Henry

Aaron James Henry is a former SSHRC post-doctoral fellow and an adjunct professor at Carleton University, Canada, with the Institute of Political Economy.  Dr. Henry has written and lectured on social theory, critical security studies and surveillance.

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