Fall Asleep to the ENTIRE Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company — The Merchants Who Ruled North America

This video tells the story of the Hudson's Bay Company — founded in 1670, dissolved in bankruptcy in 2025, and in between the two most consequential and most morally complex commercial institutions in the history of North America. Beginning with the beaver hat and the specific economic logic that drove the entire enterprise, the story follows the two French fur traders whose scheme — pitched to an English prince after the colonial authorities of New France fined them for trading without a license — produced a royal charter granting a private company sovereign authority over 1.5 million square miles of the North American interior. It traces the company through its wars with France, the extraordinary diplomacy of Thanadelthur, the violent rivalry with the North West Company, and the continental ambitions of George Simpson, who administered the largest private landholding on earth with a ruthless efficiency that shaped the geography of Canada as surely as any government. The story also gives full weight to what the company's two centuries of territorial governance cost: the Indigenous peoples whose trade networks built the enterprise and whose populations were devastated by the epidemics that traveled the same routes as the trade goods, the Métis nation the trade created and then sold with the land in 1869, and Louis Riel's two resistances — the second ending with his execution in 1885, a wound in Canadian national memory that has never fully closed. This gentle bedtime history explores the Hudson's Bay Company as a story of commerce, empire, Indigenous sovereignty, and the strange institutional endurance of an organization that outlasted the fashion trend that created it by nearly two centuries. #HistoryForSleep #DriftThroughHistory #HudsonsBayCompany #CanadianHistory #FurTrade