The study of the fur trade as a discrete academic specialty is a product of the last fifty years. Prior to this period, the fur trade was generally confined to a supporting role in metanarratives devoted to nation-building, economic history, or colonization. As such, the discussion of the trade was often racist, sometimes judgmental, and often penned by antiquarians rather than by professionally trained scholars. Since the advent of ethnohistorical research approaches in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the traditional narratives of Indian–white trading encounters have been revisited. Revisionist research focussing on the agency of racial and cultural minorities, women, and the labouring classes has produced a body of work that reveals the complexity of these early encounters, and in doing so has returned the humanity to both the traders and their Indian customers.

This compilation, edited by fur trade scholar Susan Sleeper-Smith of Michigan State University, is a retrospective collection of essays, most of which were published over the last forty or fifty years, that illustrate specific aspects of fur trade culture. The focus of the collection is confined geographically to the Atlantic coast, the Great Lakes basin and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and north of the Canadian shield in the region dominated by the Hudson's Bay Company.

These essays are divided thematically into five categories. Part One, “New Perspectives,” consists of an introductory paper by the editor that defines the region under study and introduces the overarching goal of the anthology – to investigate “the exchange processes that came to characterize the North Atlantic commerce in furs” (xviii). More specifically, the anthology places the fur trade within the context of its international transatlantic trading context, and traces its evolution into smaller, regionalized systems of exchange. And, perhaps more importantly, the volume emphasizes the central role that indigenous people – particularly indigenous women – played in bridging the vast gulf between races and worldviews in order that the trading relationship might survive and prosper.

Parts Two to Five contain studies focussing on the following themes: “Indian Voices,” “The Social and Political Significance of Exchange,” “Cloth Trade,” and “Gender, Kinship and Community.” One might quibble with some of the categories – why just focus on cloth trade? And one could puzzle over why certain important articles are missing from this collection, while valuable space is devoted to an unnecessary, even provocative, tract by Richard White addressing the critics of his remarkable book The Middle Ground. Most of the scholarly works included in this compilation, however, are papers that are well known and often cited in secondary scholarship. Moreover, some of these essays were in books that have been out of print for decades. Rethinking the Fur Trade makes these important studies accessible to a new generation of scholars, who will find them as fresh and original as when they were first published.