is an analysis of marital relationships and status of children in “Indian country” during the 18th and 19th centuries – that is, of the partnerships entered into by Hudson Bay Company and North West Company traders and of the children that often resulted.Brown is actually attempting to accomplish several tasks in this volume: a comparative history of the Hudson Bay- and Montreal-based fur trades, an extension of Louis Hartz’s theory of colonial fragments to fur trade society, and, finally, the titular claim that fur traders’ families occupied a socially and legally uncertain and shifting grey area often referred to in court documents as “strangers in blood.” These processes are then subdivided by trade and period: French (then French-Scottish) and British trade prior to the 1821 merger, and the Victorian and (in fur trade terms) Simpsonian period of the following decades. Brown also divides her analysis between the marital relationships themselves (the first two-thirds of the book) and the fur trade children (the final two chapters). Her work relies solely on written correspondence, which she acknowledges skews the analysis in particular directions (commissioned officers, favoured sons, etc.).
