Gilles Havard
Translated by Geoffrey D. Kimball
Praise for the original French edition
“Havard shows what a great historian can do with this
vast, profuse, and ambivalent topic. . . . Havard’s learning is multifaceted and his techniques varied; his scholarly rigor is entirely consistent. It’s not just his mastery of
a huge body of primary sources, but his judicious and
transparent use of them to support his claims.”
—PAUL MAPP,
Books and Ideas.net
Empire of Pelts sheds new light on the history of early North America by reconsidering the misunderstood social figure of the coureur de bois, born in Canada in the second half of the seventeenth century, who underwent many iterations across North America through the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Gilles Havard conceptualizes the traveling cultures of the fur trade that emerged from the encounter between colonial and Native American societies. Variously known as coureurs de bois, voyageurs, Indian traders, hunters, northmen, freemen, and mountain men, these men, while collecting pelts, played a crucial role in the understanding and perception of Native American cultures.
While challenging the standard portrayal of fur traders as mere precursors of colonization, Empire of Pelts reflects on how intercultural contacts shaped North American colonial societies. Moving beyond a descriptive and general history of the fur trade, it also breaks away from the economic and materialist mold in which coureurs de bois and voyageurs have been analyzed, as if they were nothing more than a proletarian labor force of paddlers. Instead, by being a social and cultural history of the fur trade, Empire of Pelts offers a meditation on social norms, first in the context of colonial societies, then in the context of Indigenous societies.
Gilles Havard is research director at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris). He is the author of The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701 and numerous award-winning history books in French, including a book about the Natchez. Geoffrey D. Kimball is the author of Natchez Analytical Dictionary (Nebraska, 2025), compiler of Yukhíti Kóy: A Reference Grammar of the Atakapa Language (Nebraska, 2022), and translator of Koasati Traditional Narratives (Nebraska, 2010).
The original French edition of Empire of Pelts (Histoire des coureurs de bois) is the winner of
· Grand Prize at the French Blois History Festival
· Lionel Groulx Prize from the Canadian Institute of French America History
· P. Savard Prize from the International Council for Canadian Studies
· Robert Delavignette Prize from the French Academy of Overseas Sciences
· Honorable Mention from the Organization of American Historians
