num_pages: 442
description: From the best-selling author of Leviathan comes this sweeping narrative of one of Americas most historically rich industries. Beginning his epic history in the early 1600s Eric Jay Dolin traces the dramatic rise and fall of the American fur industry from the first Dutch encounters with the Indians to the rise of the conservation movement in the late nineteenth century. Dolin shows how the fur trade driven by the demands of fashion sparked controversy fostered economic competition and fueled wars among the European powers as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. The trade in beaver buffalo sea otter and other animal skins spurred the exploration and the settlement of the vast American continent while it alternately enriched and gravely damaged the lives of Americas native peoples. Populated by a larger-than-life castincluding Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant; President Thomas Jefferson; Americas first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor; and mountain man Kit CarsonFur Fortune and Empire is the most comprehensive and compelling history of the American fur trade ever written. 16 pages of color and 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations as well as a two-page endpaper map of the American fur trade beyond the Mississippi.Starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.Nobody writes about the link between American history and natural history with the scholarly grace of Eric Jay Dolin. Fur Fortune and Empire is a landmark study filled with a cast of eccentric Western-type characters. Dolin's research is prodigious. Not since the days of Francis Parkman has a historian analyzed the fur trade industry with such brilliance. Highly recommended! -- Douglas Brinkley Author Cronkite and The Wilderness WarriorFur Fortune and Empire is no melancholy affair. The book bursts with colorful characters venal corporations and violent confrontations all presented with sharp-eyed clarity in a narrative that clips right along. . . . One of the great pleasures of Eric Jay Dolin's work in both Leviathan and Fur Fortune and Empire comes in discovering centuries old antecedents of the economic and natural resource issues that we struggle with today. . . . there are plenty of insights as well as much reading pleasure to be had here. Bruce Barcott Audubon MagazineA superb one-volume examination of an era when American ingenuity and its competitive spirit began to flourish. . . Dolin describes in marvelous detail . . . colorful figures of the American fur trades' western expansion. . . . at last we now have a book that properly accounts for America's rise as a fur-trade power. -- Michael Taube The Wall Street JournalThough guns germs and steel certainly played their parts Dolin's Fur Fortune and Empire leaves little doubt that the trade in pelts was a powerful force in shaping the course of American history from the early 1600s through the late 1800s playing a major role in the settlement and evolution of the colonies and in the growth of the United States. Dolin puts forth a compelling and well-annotated tale of greed slaughter and geopolitics as the Dutch English French Spanish Swedes Russians and the American colonists fought for a slice of the profit. -- Art Winslow The Los Angeles Times
language: English
title: Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company