Coming in December 2026 to the Mises bookstore.
From the early 1900s to the end of World War II, trading posts along the eastern Arctic coast bought white fox pelts from Inuit trappers. They paid in trade goods including rifles, fabric, flour, tea, tobacco, and tools. The Canadian government claimed the region on paper but had almost no presence there. On the ground, Inuit communities still governed themselves by their own customary law, rooted in kinship-based private property and restorative justice. Traders couldn’t call on the state for protection, so they learned the language, respected local custom, and dealt fairly with their partners. The result was a rare episode in the history of the Americas: decades of peaceful, mutually beneficial exchange between native peoples and newcomers—an interlude of freedom.
In An Interlude of Freedom, Mises Institute editor and historian Daniella F. Bassi tells how that order worked and how it came apart. Drawing on Hudson’s Bay Company post journals, traders’ memoirs, government records, and oral interviews with traders and Inuit elders, she uses natural rights theory and Austrian economics—rather than the usual Marxism and historicism—to reinterpret this unique historical moment by reframing it around state power. Bassi traces the arrival of the Canadian state: police detachments, wartime trade restrictions, a credit-fueled fur bubble and crash, conservation laws, forced relocations, and finally the Family Allowance program, which drew Inuit off the land and into government settlements. Many historians blame capitalism for the conquest of native peoples. Bassi offers a radical liberal and Austrian School answer: The trade was a source of harmony, and the destruction of Inuit autonomy and prosperity was the work of the state.
Daniella Bassi oversees the editing and production of Mises Institute books, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and The Misesian magazine. She holds master’s degrees in early American history from the College of William and Mary and the University of Vermont, and she earned an undergraduate degree in English from Amherst College. She is a Rothbardian, and her writings interpret Canadian and American indigenous history from that perspective.
"There’s no doubt that the Americas [and its indigenous populations] were irrevocably changed by European contact. ... In this essay I invite readers to interpret the history of the Americas through a more useful thematic lens: rulers versus subjects."
Daniella Bassi tells the remarkable story of the Arctic fur trade as a real-world case study in stateless order.
