This expansive history of the fur trade in America is continental in its perspective and extends from the time of contact to the end of the nineteenth century, when the author shows how public reaction to the mass extermination of fur-bearing animals led to increased regulation by state and federal levels of government. The narrative of this book is beautifully crafted and Dolin's lively prose style draws his readers into a highly complicated story about the fur trade that is driven by both access to furs and the contest for empire. His examination of both traditional fur trade regions and the early Atlantic and Pacific coastal dimensions of the trade provides new insights into why the fur trade mattered in US history. He clearly demonstrates how the success of the early colonies, like Plymouth, New Amsterdam, and New Sweden, depended for their access on Indian furs and how the contest for overseas empires by European governments became intertwined with why colonies succeeded or failed.

This narrative falters when Dolin shifts his focus from the Atlantic seaboard to the continent's heartland to explore the French fur trade and the clash between the French, the English, and the Americans for empire. Unfortunately, Dolin remains heavily dependent on older narratives, written during the early years of the twentieth century, to explain the trade in the Great Lakes region. Many of these narratives were written at the apex of a nationalistic approach, inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, and by the relentless westward expansion of Americans who believed that Indian lands were their manifest destiny. Recent work, like that of Richard White's The Middle Ground, suggests an alternative scenario where empires clashed but Indians were central to the outcome. Because this was an Indian world until the nineteenth century, the author would have profited by enriching this section with a fuller representation of the recent scholarship. Indian women are not part of this narrative, nor intermarriage, nor the evolution of a mixed-ancestry population, nor a Métis population. Most problematic is the lack of an Indian voice. At least half of those involved in the fur trade were Indians, but Dolin relies on one anecdotal story from the Jesuits to explain the Indian perspective. Indians did not leave a written record of their involvement but the work of the New Indian historians suggests that there are a multitude of sources for incorporating an Indigenous perspective that, once uncovered, reveals the strategies that led to Indian persistence rather than to their precipitous decline. Dan Richter has suggested that the fur trade was really the “cloth trade” and historians have shown that cloth constituted as much as 70 to 80 percent of the goods involved in the exchange process. This contributed to an incredible renaissance in Indian culture. Americans that moved into the Great Lakes in the nineteenth century encountered Indians that were often better fed, better dressed, and better housed than the newcomers. Rather than relying on the scenarios of dependence created by early frontier and fur trade historians, the chapter on the French merits incorporation of the more recent literature.

Unfortunately, reliance on this older narrative approach also produces a disjuncture between the geographical sections in this book. Dolin describes a fur trade that moved from east to west but he fails to show how European powers shaped that movement. The French crossed the Mississippi well before the Americans and while they may have lost their North American empire they left thousands of people whose footprint, like that of the Indians, has been successfully wiped clean by Turnerian-inspired nationalist narratives.

Despite these problems, this is a well-written, comprehensive analysis of the fur trade that goes beyond one region or one time period. Dolin brings clarity to understanding the fur trade as a continental project. Greater cognizance of more recent research would have given the people involved in the trade, especially Indians and the French, greater agency in this sweeping narrative.