Ecocide for hats
May. 7th, 2025 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI have been busy as all get-out so it took me way longer than I’d have liked to finish my April nonfiction commitment, Eric Jay Dolan’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America.
This book, as you can probably guess from the title, covers the fur trade on the North American continent, from the first European fur trappers (mainly the French) to start kicking around Canada as early as the 1500s, up through the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, once the near-extinction of the buffalo managed to shock even jingoistic American capitalist types into noticing what destruction they had wrought. Dolin brings his characteristic naturalist’s eye to this story, focusing on the ecological effects of the fur trade nearly as much as the political and cultural ones, and giving the fur animals themselves their due–beavers, buffalo, fur seals, and sea otters are nearly as well-developed characters here as the various humans.
Fur trading was often the “tip of the spear” for European colonization in North America, which lacked the huge and immediately findable gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where the Spanish set up shop early in the 1500s. The history of the fur trade in what would become Canada, the U.S., and the northern parts of the Mexican territory is therefore basically synonymous with the history of European colonization of those parts, and many of the events recounted here were familiar to me from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, including the complex trade relationships with Indian tribes, and the Russian colonization of Alaska (they did it to obtain fur seals after they’d basically wiped out sable in Siberia).
The story is tragic on basically every level: the fur trade massively upset the ecological balance that Indian nations who hunted fur-bearing animals had lived in pre-colonization, leading to devastation of the habitats and populations of the animals in question; it rendered the Indians dependent on European trade goods and simultaneously vulnerable to European-introduced diseases, gun violence, and alcohol abuse, which facilitated the seizure of their land; it led to the growth of big monopolistic fur companies that mistreated their workers and put them into debt peonage. Lots of human beings died in addition to the animals being hunted. Also, I’ve been watching Blue Planet II when I need some downtime, and have you seen sea otters? They’re so cute! How could you kill so many of these lil guys?
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/globalassets/mba/images/animals/marine-mammals/sea-otter-327-surrogate-mother-toola-rw05-082.jpg?width=966&height=644&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=60
That said, it’s still quite a fascinating set of stories, and I certainly feel much more educated about stuff I didn’t really know much about before, like the settling of the Southwest and California. Someday I need to read a proper history of California.
This book, as you can probably guess from the title, covers the fur trade on the North American continent, from the first European fur trappers (mainly the French) to start kicking around Canada as early as the 1500s, up through the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, once the near-extinction of the buffalo managed to shock even jingoistic American capitalist types into noticing what destruction they had wrought. Dolin brings his characteristic naturalist’s eye to this story, focusing on the ecological effects of the fur trade nearly as much as the political and cultural ones, and giving the fur animals themselves their due–beavers, buffalo, fur seals, and sea otters are nearly as well-developed characters here as the various humans.
Fur trading was often the “tip of the spear” for European colonization in North America, which lacked the huge and immediately findable gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where the Spanish set up shop early in the 1500s. The history of the fur trade in what would become Canada, the U.S., and the northern parts of the Mexican territory is therefore basically synonymous with the history of European colonization of those parts, and many of the events recounted here were familiar to me from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, including the complex trade relationships with Indian tribes, and the Russian colonization of Alaska (they did it to obtain fur seals after they’d basically wiped out sable in Siberia).
The story is tragic on basically every level: the fur trade massively upset the ecological balance that Indian nations who hunted fur-bearing animals had lived in pre-colonization, leading to devastation of the habitats and populations of the animals in question; it rendered the Indians dependent on European trade goods and simultaneously vulnerable to European-introduced diseases, gun violence, and alcohol abuse, which facilitated the seizure of their land; it led to the growth of big monopolistic fur companies that mistreated their workers and put them into debt peonage. Lots of human beings died in addition to the animals being hunted. Also, I’ve been watching Blue Planet II when I need some downtime, and have you seen sea otters? They’re so cute! How could you kill so many of these lil guys?
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/globalassets/mba/images/animals/marine-mammals/sea-otter-327-surrogate-mother-toola-rw05-082.jpg?width=966&height=644&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=60
That said, it’s still quite a fascinating set of stories, and I certainly feel much more educated about stuff I didn’t really know much about before, like the settling of the Southwest and California. Someday I need to read a proper history of California.