Accounting for Partridge: Food and Value in the Eighteenth-Century Hudson’s Bay Company

The Hudson Bay Company (HBC) fundamentally changed food strategies in North America. Rather than go where food was, company servants stationed along Hudson Bay traded with Indigenous hunters for the flesh of wild animals. HBC officials expected this food to be cheap, a strategy that defines our understandings of commodity frontiers. Yet a focus on price requires greater attention to how firms account for costs. This article argues that the HBC’s post-1774 expansion inland exacerbated tensions related to control over the trade in country provisions between the company and Maškēkowak hunters. Recurrent food crises related to one animal—partridge—at the HBC’s principal post, York Fort, in the 1780s and 1790s prompted defences of what food was worth beyond its exchange value, in evaluations recorded outside the company’s ledgers. Not only did experiences hunting and eating partridges shape the HBC’s later search for other cheap foods. It also suggests ways to rethink the politics of prices within commercial enterprises.