This paper analyzes the historiography of the fur trade in the Canadian Subarctic region from the 16th to the 19th century to identify the constitutive elements and workings related to the articulation of the Indigenous traditional economy and the European commercial-proto industrial economic model. This system of articulation is constituted of the following: the MB-standard or made beaver; the credit system; a politics of gift; the introduction of manufactured goods. The paper explains at length the role of each of these four components and their systemic interaction, and aims to demonstrate that the Indigenous and European interpretations of this system are radically different and that the system has thrived on inter-miscomprehension; that the credit system and its loyalty inducement dimension was a crucial feature of the articulation of the two economies; and that this articulation and its components are key elements in the historical proletarization and territorial dispossession of the Indigenous peoples implicated in the fur trade industry, and has thus played a central role in the process of producing the colonial space on which contemporary Canada has been erected.