http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/07/20/fur_fortune_and_empire_eric_jay_dolin
Tuesday, Jul 20, 2010 09:15 ET
“Fur, Fortune, and Empire”: How the fur trade shaped America
Animal pelts helped create our nation — and spawn a global power
struggle. A fascinating new book explains how
By Chuck Leddy, Barnes & Noble Review
Fur, Fortune, and Empire by Eric Jay Dolin
Historian Eric Jay Dolin brilliantly argues that the trade in
animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier
where global powers battled for control. From the 17th century
right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world’s appetite for
fur and its unique qualities made the new continent, with its
wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible
resource. The result, as laid out in Dolin’s new book “Fur,
Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in
America,” was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into
a powerful new player on the world stage.
Modern-day Manhattan, for example, owes its existence to the Dutch
eagerness to establish dominance in the fur trade: New Amsterdam
was first settled in the early 17th century as a trading post
where they could exchange European metal goods for beaver pelts
brought in by Native Americans. The Dutch wielded military power
to oust rival Sweden from the colonial fur trade, yet the
popularity of their wares proved their undoing. The intense
competition from the English colonies and from French fur traders
came with armed backing, and the English Navy ultimately ousted
the Dutch from New Amsterdam in 1664.
Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created
international tensions — in New England, the Great Lakes and the
expanding West. As traders clamored for access to land controlled
by Native Americans, tribes were pushed off their land, then given
guns and liquor, wreaking havoc on their traditional way of life.
The fur trade also triggered exploration more generally; fur
traders were often the first white men to map major rivers,
forests and mountains. The trade and the broader economy that
followed in its wake pulled people west, including Lewis and Clark
and Kit Carson, culminating in the monopoly of the 19th-century
fur trader and celebrated philanthropist John Jacob Astor, whose
American Fur Co. opened up trading posts across America (and whose
fortune would endow the library that became a national icon). For
all of fur’s contentious position in American culture today, Dolin
has skillfully illuminated its centrality in our nation’s
ever-surprising history.