Faculty Publications & Research
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Winter 2011
Disciplines
History
Abstract
Eric J. Dolin’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire is a concise, engaging, and remarkably comprehensive survey of the American fur trade. Though aimed at a general readership, the author presents a broad-ranging, sophisticated story of the commerce, supported by nearly a hundred pages of citations. The author says that the inspiration for the book came from a passage in James Truslow Adams’s The Founding of New England: “The Bible and the Beaver were the two mainstays of the Plymouth Colony in its early years.” He knew something about Pilgrims and something about the fur trade, but nothing of the Pilgrim fur trade. From this, Dolin set out to explore the role of the trade in the founding of America and its expansion westward.
Recommended Citation
Skinner, Claiborne. Review of Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in American, Eric J. Dolin. Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 109, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 81-83. http://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/hss_pr/4/.