Sometimes Imperialism Wears an Expensive Fur Hat

The Manchus, whose soldiers conquered China in the 1640s and whose Qing dynasty ruled it for 270 years, shared with other northern Eurasian peoples a love of fur. In the cold northern provinces of the Qing Empire, ermine, sable, and otter adorned the hats and outer garments of Manchu elites and their wealthier Han subjects. Of all these adornments the thick and lustrous pelts of Pacific sea otters were probably most prized. European observers claimed that Han merchants would buy otter fur for its weight in silver. This made sea otter pelts very valuable to Europeans, for China had much that Europe wanted - tea and fine silks, in particular - and Europe had nothing China wanted, except for silver itself. Hard cash being ever in short supply in the backward and barbarous West, China-bound merchants saw the luxury fur market as their salvation. Here at last was a commodity the sophisticated Han would willingly buy.*

Russia pioneered the Chinese luxury-fur trade, selling high-value pelts at the Qing entrepot of Kyakta on the Amur River. Once Russian traders (promyshlenniki) discovered the value of sea otter pelts, they began buying or seizing them from northern Pacific indigenes. From the Kamchatka Peninsula the adventurers expanded their range into the Aleutian Islands, thence to southern and southeastern Alaska. The 100 or so Russian trading expeditions to Alaska between 1740 and 1800 brought home up to 4,000 otter pelts each, and collectively sold eight million rubles’ worth** of otter in northern China. Many paid little or nothing to their Native American suppliers, forcing Aleut hunters (for instance) into their service by taking Aleut families hostage. Some indigenes proved harder to coerce: the Tlingits destroyed several Russian outposts rather than submit to serfdom, and the Russian-American Company decided that peaceful commerce would cost less than the conquest of so large a nation. Russians bought the Tlingits’ furs with European and Chinese trade goods. Tlingit chiefs displayed the wealth they derived from the tripartite Pacific trade by wearing vests adorned with one of their new imports: Chinese coins. Three continents’ peoples were now joined not only by commerce but by the exotic clothing, the bright silks and sleek furs and formidable vests, that their elites showed off in public.

Russia could not long enjoy a monopoly of northern Pacific commerce. Other European powers with strong mercantile fleets soon inserted themselves into the Sino-American otter trade. Britain got in early, after James Cook learned (1778) that the Nootka people would sell the furs of “sea beavers” (as he called otters) for a relative pittance. The fractious but intrepid Americans soon followed. After American independence New Englanders began sailing round the Horn to the north Pacific, stopping near the Columbia River to swap beads and nails for Chinook hunters’ furs, then continuing on to Canton with their “soft gold.” By 1820, 400 British and American trading ships had called at the Columbia, Puget Sound, and Vancouver Island. Sea otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest drew lower prices than their Alaskan equivalents, but Alaska lay under a Russian claim, and otter remained easier for Americans (or Brits) to obtain in quantity than their other China-market export, ginseng.

Fairly early on, wealthy British and American merchants, and the government officials with whom they enjoyed a more-than-cordial relationship, realized that a land-based otter trade could probably operate more cheaply and effectively than a maritime one. Coastal trading posts could attract trading partners from greater distances, as Native American hunters would presumably more readily undertake long journeys to a permanently staffed storehouse than to an ephemeral landing site. Also, such posts might prove easier to supply by land than by sea. Using an oceanic route, the Pacific Northwest lay half a planet away from London and Boston, but a continental riverine route might make it more accessible from the eastern United States and Canada.

Britain’s Northwest Company, one of the two largest trading firms in eighteenth-century Canada, made an early attempt to develop an overland route to the western sea. In 1792-93 NWC employee Alexander McKenzie, with substantial assistance from Native American guides, crossed the northern Rockies to the Pacific. The path he followed proved too rough and difficult for sustained long-distance commerce. Nonetheless, it stoked the anxieties of American officials when Mackenzie published an account of his travels in London a decade later. President Thomas Jefferson worried that the British would soon discover a cheap and easy overland route to the Pacific, use it to establish trading posts in the Northwest, and thereby dominate the region’s sea-otter trade. Hoping that the United States could beat Britain to the punch, Jefferson directed the Corps of Discovery (which departed one year after the release of Mackenzie’s book) to chart a route for water traffic from the center of North America to the western shore, and to plant the American flag on the north Pacific coast. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark weren’t engaged in an early act of Manifest Destiny, blazing a trail for brave pioneer settlers*** - they were securing American access to the complex and valuable China trade. Gumption and bravery these explorers doubtless had, but what set them on their course were silk and silver, Manchu fur hats and Native American coin vests, and plain old-fashioned imperialism.

Sources:

James Gibson, Otter Skins, British Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast (McGill-Queens UP, 1992), 12-15

Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, 2014), Chapter 1

Jonathan Schlesinger, “China’s Tangled Environmental History,” The Diplomat, 5 November 2016

Alan Taylor, “Continental Crossings,” Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004): 182-188

Jason Wordie, “Pelt and Road: How Trade with China was Smoothed with Furs from British Columbia,” South China Morning Post, 7 March 2018

* Before the British introduced opium, the only other European imports saleable in China were French clocks and printed cotton cloth, the latter of which Chinese traders bought only reluctantly.

** About 240-480 million modern U.S. dollars, based on the equivalent exchange values between each currency and gold.

*** The Oregon Trail followed a different route than Lewis and Clark’s path, in any case, a route pioneered by the first American fur-trading company to set up shop in the Pacific Northwest.