The Crees of Saskatchewan adjusted their economic life in reaction to their long and interdependent relationship with European fur traders. For the period from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, this paper examines one aspect of the Crees' economic adjustment to the fur trade, the limiting of access to the land and its resources to conserve the fragile supply of furbearmg animals. Hudson's Bay Company documents and studies by anthropologists provide the basis for this economic study.

The major contrast between preindustrial and modern economies is that the latter enjoy regular and rapid growth, whereas income per capita tends to stagnate in the former. Analysis of the organization of exchange in early Christian Ireland shows that the exchange and therefore the production of material wealth was so thoroughly integrated into securing and exercising power, as well as into establishing and maintaining family and social ties, that any improvements in technology which might have led to economic growth would inevitably have generated prohibitive social costs.

This article argues that the development of the peasant commune in Russia, with its periodic repartition of serf holdings, hierarchy of authority, and dependence on corvee as a form of obligation, was a consequence of enslavement of the Russian peasant. These features of the commune are seen as reducing the costs of both monitoring labor effort, and maintaining the productive capacity of the serf. The chronology of their development and their association with the more fertile land of European Russia and with private as opposed to state ownership provide evidence for the argument.