A tip o’ the hat to friends in parts north…
I think the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) is almost universally known in Canada & the US, but I’m not sure about elsewhere. The HBC was the oldest corporation in North America, founded in 1670, and HQ’ed out of Toronto in recent centuries (HBC is older than Toronto!)
I don’t know how HBC is thought of in Canada today, but if you mention the name to anyone in the US, it’ll evoke a very 16-1700s vibe of fur trade, frontier trading posts, and moving products with canoes. It has a rich and storied history, reaching back to before either Canada or the US gained their independence. I suspect fewer people (at least in the US) realize HBC existed through to 2025, although in a very different form than in the 1600s.
HBC was nearly like a country of its own for a while. It issued its own money, was a primary belligerent in a war, and possessed land, which later would be transferred to Canada. Here is a drawing of an early HBC trading post.
HBC issued money, from 1820.
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Vancouver store in the 1890s.
Unfortunately, HBC was liquidated in 2025, as a result of multiple factors, including the internet’s erosion of retail, the 2019 pandemic, and unfortunate others. It is always a little sad to see an end to such a storied name, that you read about in history books, and managed to make a go of it for 355 years.
[Edited title because I apparently can’t spell Vancouver]
It’s like the East India Trading Company etc. but lower profile.
They were liquidated in no small part due to private equity. The same story repeated for a number of well known brands over the years, like Sears.
Indeed. It does seem like powerful corporations in the 16-1700s era were almost quasi-states, minting their own money, having armies, and exercising sovereign control over territory. Today there are military contractors, but generally not as sovereigns.