Eric Jay Dolin: Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America

From the American Thinker (January, 2011): In a fascinating book entitled Furs, Fortune, and Empire (New York, 2010), Eric Jay Dolin recounts the entire history of the fur trade in America. Dolin's book is full of interesting stories, one of which involves government's attempted takeover of the fur trade during the early 19th century. The story calls to mind government's intervention in the home mortgage market nearly two centuries later, and for much the same reasons, the government fur operation was a dismal failure. As Dolin points out, the U.S. government did not enter the fur trade with the idea of making a profit. Its overriding purpose was to protect American Indians, who, as liberals of the day believed, were being cheated by private fur companies. In creating the so-called "factory system," government would organize the fur trade as a nonprofit enterprise. With the advantage of taxpayer subsidies, government agents would then drive the for-profit traders out of business. In the minds of liberals of the day, social justice necessitated government intervention in the fur trade. Once government had driven profiteers from the field, Indians would receive a fair price for their furs, and they would be spared the harmful effects of alcohol (with which the private traders were said to ply their "victims"). And once they realized how much better off they were under the protection of government, Indian tribes would become allies of the United States, to the betterment of both parties.



From W. W. Norton & Company: Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.





From the Washington Post, by Kirk Davis Swinehart: Even among historians of colonial America -- who should know and care about such things -- the fur trade tends to elicit groans of boredom. The subject is so blandly ubiquitous that it seems to demand little explanation even as it remains, at heart, a confounding mystery to anyone but the most narrowly focused specialists. Like the transatlantic slave trade, the fur trade exists more as a nebulous concept than as a richly complex industry populated by some of the most colorful and nefarious personalities in world history. And that's because it is rendered unrecognizable by its powerful association with a primitive, far-distant past. Yet the fur trade remains very much alive: a multi-billion-dollar global business with discernible ties to its earlier incarnation. In "Fur, Fortune, and Empire," Eric Jay Dolin ranges far and wide over land and sea, searching for the beating heart of a gargantuan industry touched by almost every aspect of human society and human nature: war, power, money, faith, desire and ambition. Dolin concerns himself primarily with the trade's North American theater between the 17th and late 19th centuries, from European colonization to post-Revolutionary America's colonization of its own Western interior. But he keeps a close eye on the wider world, too. As in "Leviathan," his highly praised book on U.S. whaling, he restores what most of us regard as an American institution to its rightful place on the international stage. The result is easily the finest tale of the trade in recent memory, a crisply written tale unburdened by excessive detail or homespun provincialism.



From The Oregonian: Eric Jay Dolin's new book, "Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America," is here to tell the real story behind the men who transformed a continent while in pursuit of pelts. Or, at least as much of the story that can be told in 464 pages. Fueled by an international business model built on vanity, fur trappers from the 17th century to the late 19th century decimated species ranging from sea otters (so overhunted they are still not recovered in Oregon) to beavers. In doing so, they opened North America to settlement, exploring and mapping the future while expanding national boundaries, particularly in the Northwest. The characters in this drama are at once so outrageous and so admirable that it is no wonder the era has become a stew of fable and truth. Dolin does his job separating the two in his popular history, explaining that the demand for furs for expensive clothing in China and Europe was such an economic driver that even the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony found themselves propelled into the trade.