Fur, Fortune, and Empire review by Josh

I listened to the audiobook, and it was fairly interesting.

Much of the book is a narrative history of the various troubles fur traders got into. Dolin seems to generally accept these narratives unquestioningly, which gives the book an inevitable European-centric gloss, since the recorded narratives are almost all based on the testimony of European traders, rather than the Indian peoples who did most of the actual trapping.

Dolin made a few interesting points that I had not thought much about before:

1. The view that Europeans systematically took advantage of indigenous people in fur trading doesn't hold up to scrutiny, at least for land based trading posts. European traders depended on good relations with Indigenous tribes, for continued trade.

2. Shipborne traders tended to be much worse behaved than land based ones because they had no need to maintain long-term relationships and could flee quickly if pissed off the local indigenous population.

3. The growth of U.S. trading power was significantly increased by the withdrawal of the East India Company from the U.S. market at the beginning of the U.S. revolution. Americans had become enthusiastic consumers of Chinese tea and porcelain during the colonial period and when those imports were suddenly cut off it create an opening for American traders who sent ships filled with furs to the east and returned with ships full of porcelain and tea.

One thing I didn't get from this book is why fur enjoyed such an enormous boom in the 18th and 19th centuries. People have been wearing furs since prehistoric times. I suppose part of the reason may be simply a knock on effect of the global population and economic boom, combined with the novel luxury of American animals, like beavers.