(Note on the title: The Chinese title “皮毛” literally translates to “Fur” or “Pelts,” referring to the fur trade discussed in the article. However, in Chinese, “皮毛” is also a common idiom meaning “superficial knowledge” or “scratching the surface.” The title serves as a clever double entendre).
Lately, the world has been somewhat chaotic, seemingly reverting to the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak. To distinguish the signal from the noise, we need to zoom out and look at a longer timeframe.
In my piece How the World Was Changed, I emphasized one specific viewpoint: “If we look from the perspective of the entire Earth or an alien observer, those influential historical figures might not matter at all. Instead, the development of technology is the hidden thread that dictates everything.”
If anyone today still doubts the disruptive impact of the AI revolution on the world, they should consider the history of human evolution. How did humans manage to shed their body hair and achieve a “dimensionality reduction strike” (absolute dominance) while surrounded by wolves, tigers, and leopards? The answer is intelligence.
To achieve a brain-to-body mass ratio surpassing all other animals, humans paid a tremendously heavy price: we became the only species that struggles to give birth unassisted, and the only species whose offspring remain completely dependent for years. Meanwhile, our neuron-packed brains consume 20% more of our body’s energy. Over the past 10,000 years, the resulting fierce competition for food has led to more than 10 billion people starving to death.
So make no mistake: to achieve intellectual dominance over our peers, humanity will pour money into AI in the future at absolutely any cost.
This perspective is, admittedly, a bit cruel. Let’s turn our attention back to an even more cutthroat era two hundred years ago, and look at how a simple fur trade destroyed indigenous species and reshaped the geopolitical map we know today.
I.
What happened next in the story of Blue Fox Island?
Decades after Vitus Bering’s death, the United States gained independence, but its territory was confined to the eastern part of the North American continent. To the north of the US, there were still British and French colonies. The western side of the North American continent was more interesting: California belonged to Spain, and further north was almost entirely Indigenous territory.
Russian hunters had already begun crossing the Bering Strait to hunt. Later, Captain Cook and his subordinate George Vancouver essentially mapped out the Pacific and the west coast of North America. Interestingly, neither claimed the North American west coast as British territory; perhaps they thought the journey back home to Europe from there was simply too inconvenient.
The regions spanning today from the US states of Oregon and Washington up to Canada’s British Columbia and Alaska were, back then, essentially the domain of hunters. This was because fur was the absolute most important business—bar none. In Europe, beaver pelt hats were said to be the standard accessory for the upper class, roughly equivalent to wearing a luxury Swiss watch today.
The profit margins in the fur trade were tenfold or even dozens of times the cost—even higher than the illicit drug trade today. You can imagine the lengths people went to for this.
During the Qing Dynasty, Manchu nobles loved wearing mink (“diao”), which was naturally a luxury item. But in terms of high fashion, sea otter pelts were even more popular among the Qing upper crust. Sea otter fur is the densest type of pelt and is perfectly suited for high-end garments. It can have up to 1 million hairs per square inch—a density that feels somewhat akin to the technological precision of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) today.
II.
Russia established the Russian-American Company (RAC) with official state backing. Most of the hunters’ catches in Alaska were shipped to the Chinese market, yet supply still couldn’t meet demand.
The British had a massive proxy in their North American colonies called the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which functioned somewhat like a half-scale American version of the East India Company. With a stroke of a pen, the British King granted a gigantic swath of land—nearly 4 million square kilometers—to the HBC to manage.
And that didn’t even include Hudson Bay itself, an unimaginably huge bay within Canada roughly the size of Tibet. Imagine how devastating it must have been for colonial explorers back then to sail into it for a month, only to realize it was a dead end.
HBC’s main operations were in the central and eastern regions, shipping furs back home to Europe. Because pelts are relatively light, a single ship could easily carry thousands of them; it was a fantastic business. Business in the western part of North America was mainly operated by a firm called the North West Company (NWC), which similarly controlled over 4 million square kilometers of land.
I originally thought that hauling furs across the Rocky Mountains to the East would have been downright impossible. But in reality, people at the time considered sailing around the perilous Cape Horn in South America to be even less viable. The NWC hired many Indigenous people along the route to run a canoe relay—somewhat like a river-based Silk Road. They navigated over 4,000 kilometers all the way to Montreal, and then traveled from the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean for another 5,000-plus kilometers to reach Britain.
In 1818, HBC and NWC engaged in a severe violent conflict known as the Battle of Seven Oaks. This led British authorities to order the merger of the two companies into a new, unified HBC.
III.
Have you noticed that there are a few problems here?
Where was the boundary between the northern territory of HBC/NWC and the Russians’ RAC? If Oregon was managed by NWC, where was the border between the British colonies in the West and the United States?
Many people know that in 1812, the United States tried to annex Canada while Europe was distracted by the Napoleonic Wars. Instead, in 1814, British forces and Canadian militias ended up burning down the White House.
After that, neither side really wanted to fight anymore. They signed the Treaty of Ghent, but it didn’t specify a western border. In 1818, the two sides signed what seems like a very strange treaty today, agreeing to jointly occupy the western territories from Oregon to Canada’s BC province. This meant that places like modern-day Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver were not exclusively claimed by either Britain or the US.
See, if major powers truly don’t want to go to war, they can always find a way to compromise.
In 1846, Britain and the US divided the American and Canadian border along the 49th parallel north. This created what is today the longest international land border in the world: nearly 9,000 kilometers long.
IV.
Let’s look back at how the border between the British and the Russians came to be; after all, the Russians were a significant presence in North America at the time.
To tackle this from two angles, let’s first take a detour and talk about Myanmar (Burma). As we all know, the most inflated of Emperor Qianlong’s “Ten Great Campaigns” was the Sino-Burmese War—the Qing dynasty simply couldn’t win it.
Burma sat right between British India and China, so the British had always been eyeing it covetously. However, with a semi-modernized military, Burma was indeed a tough nut to crack.
As a result, in the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, the British won a pyrrhic victory. They suffered 10,000 to 20,000 fatalities, losing nearly half their entire army. Keep in mind that 15 years later, in the Opium War of 1840, the British deployed fewer than 10,000 troops in total. The British spent 13 million pounds on the war—equivalent to billions today—but when the treaty was signed, Burma could only afford to pay 1 million pounds in indemnities.
The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825 was signed against this backdrop, with the British Empire making quite a few concessions. For both countries, the Alaskan border didn’t hold a massive amount of vested interest, so the treaty wasn’t highly prioritized at the time and was largely ignored later. However, it is highly relevant to this article.
If we look at a map of North America today, the border between the US state of Alaska and Canada is a perfectly straight line (the 141st meridian west). But as it goes further south, the line suddenly becomes incredibly erratic. This was caused by the Anglo-Russian Treaty.
Considering the surveying capabilities of that era, the fact that Britain and Russia didn’t just draw the 141st meridian straight down, but instead created a zigzagging border, means negotiating that treaty must have been agonizing. But in order to claim the more southerly coastline for themselves, the Russians forced the British to accept a bunch of twists and turns below the straight line. Russia wasn’t without leverage: it was one of the key suppliers for British shipbuilding, particularly for mainmasts. They had the British by the throat.
By that time, sea otters had nearly been hunted to extinction. There were only a few hundred Russians in total in Alaska, primarily operating supply outposts along the Pacific coast. At the southern end, there was a port called Sitka (where the red dot is on the map); it was practically an ice-free port year-round, so naturally, it was an important stronghold the Russians were loath to give up.
V.
What happened after that?
It sounds somewhat similar to today’s scripts. In 1853, taking advantage of a weakened Ottoman Empire, Russia invaded in hopes of securing a path through the Black Sea to the Dardanelles Strait for oceanic access. As a result, Britain and France intervened and defeated Russia in the Crimean War.
Facing extreme financial hardship post-defeat, Russia worried that Britain might invade Alaska. Since they lacked the power to defend it, and because managing a frozen wasteland whose fur resources were already depleted no longer made sense, Russia sold the land to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million. At the time, there was a lot of domestic opposition within the US; neither gold nor oil had been discovered there yet, so no one knew what the purchase was good for.
In 1870, the HBC, which seemed wealthy enough to rival a nation, returned the massive territory it governed between the latitude and longitude lines mentioned above—about 7 million square kilometers—back to the British Crown. This became the largest land source for the formation of Canada. The British government paid HBC a mere 300,000 pounds, but compensated them with a considerable amount of fertile land.
Subsequently, HBC pivoted to become a major real estate developer and retailer, existing for a total of 355 years until its bankruptcy and liquidation this year.
I wonder if you’ve spotted the “bug” in this system: Although the indigenous animals had been largely wiped out by HBC, the Indigenous people were still there. The Indigenous people believed that HBC had no right to sell their land to Canada.
VI.
Although a domineering nation, Britain places a special emphasis on jurisprudence and legal continuity. Because of this, this particular “bug” has lingered for over a century and remains incompletely resolved from a legal standpoint even today, leading to countless Indigenous lawsuits.
In 1763, Britain issued the Royal Proclamation. Its foundational concept was that geographical discovery equated to ownership, while the Indigenous people merely possessed land use rights. The concepts of “ownership” versus “use rights” are something we are probably quite familiar with, so I won’t expand on them here.
This Royal Proclamation seems logically consistent on the surface, but its fatal bug lies in the “Doctrine of Discovery.” After all, it was the Indigenous people who discovered the land first—unless both sides implicitly agreed that, prior to a certain year, Indigenous people did not count as human beings in a legal sense.
VII.
It is a fact that back then, there weren’t actually that many true colonial hunters in North America. Companies like HBC and RAC relied heavily on hiring or cooperating with Indigenous people to hunt for pelts on their behalf.
It was precisely these furs that allowed the colonizers to make massive fortunes. The ensuing colonial expansion, in turn, severely compressed the living space of the Indigenous peoples.