ECON 2K03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Big Hat, Lawrence Central High School, Lower Canada

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 2K03
• Professor: Wayne Lewchuk

Document Summary

Fish and furs allow us to explore early institutional arrangements and the dynamic between institution, organizations, and factor prices at the birth of capitalism. Helps us understand the origin of canada"s economy. First sustained exploitation of a resource by europeans. Wet method: system of fishing where you catch, gut, and pour a ton of salt over it, once ship was filled up, you went back and sold it. Dry method: the fish would be laid out on the beach, lightly salted, and then dried out in the sun. The wet method required a lot of salt. The dry method required much less salt, but did require drying stations on shore (2-3 weeks to preserve) Problem for the british as they didn"t have much salt. A lot of the salt at the time was gained through evaporation. The british didn"t have a source of salt, so they had to buy their salt and they were charged a lot for it.