Charles II's charter handed a group of London merchants and adventurers exclusive trading rights over Rupert's Land, a territory covering nearly 40% of modern Canada, in exchange for two elk and two black beaver pelts payable to the crown whenever a reigning monarch visited. The company built forts, ran the fur trade, and functioned as a quasi-government for two centuries before selling its territorial claims to Canada in 1869.
The charter's language was staggering in its scope: it granted 'sole trade and commerce' over all lands whose rivers drained into Hudson Bay, an area larger than India, without regard to the Indigenous nations who had lived there for millennia. Prince Rupert, the king's cousin and an early investor, lent his name to the territory—Rupert's Land—which the company governed almost like a private kingdom.
HBC traders built a network of fortified posts—York Factory, Fort Albany, Moose Factory—trading kettles, blankets, and guns for beaver pelts destined for European hat makers. The company developed intricate relationships, sometimes exploitative and sometimes genuinely reciprocal, with Cree, Ojibwe, and other Indigenous trading partners who supplied the furs and often the survival knowledge that kept isolated posts alive through brutal winters.
The company outlasted the fur trade's economic centrality, evolving into a retail and real estate business. In 1870, it sold Rupert's Land to the newly formed Canadian government for £300,000, a transaction that reshaped the map of a young country and set the stage for the eventual creation of Manitoba and other prairie provinces.