Winner 2010 James P. Hanlan Book Award, given by the New England Historical Association.

One of the best books of 2010 by The Seattle Times.

Winner 2011 Outdoor Writers Association of America, Excellence in Craft contest, book division, first place.

One of the top ten books of 2010 by the Rocky Mountain Land Library.

Bronze medal in the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Finalist, Reading the West Book Award, 2011, sponsored by the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association.

"Nobody writes about the link between American history and natural history with the scholarly grace of Eric Jay Dolin. Fur, Fortune, and Empire is a landmark study filled with a cast of eccentric Western-type characters. Dolin's research is prodigious. Not since the days of Francis Parkman has a historian analyzed the fur trade industry with such brilliance. Highly recommended!"

"Eric Jay Dolin has crafted a stunning companion to his recent history of the American whaling industry. . . . Focusing on the three-century chase for wealth in fur, this lively, balanced, and carefully researched account evokes an epic clash of empires from one end of the continent to the other. The book charts the rise and expansion of the American republic on the back of fur-bearing mammals and chronicles, along the way, a rogues' gallery of astonishingly vivid characters. . . . A wonderful and timely rendering of a heedless and bloody minded age."

"A superb one-volume examination of an era when American ingenuity and its competitive spirit began to flourish. . . Dolin describes in marvelous detail . . . colorful figures of the American fur trades' western expansion. . . . at last, we now have a book that properly accounts for America's rise as a fur-trade power."

"Dolin ranges far and wide over land and sea, searching for the beating heart of a gargantuan industry touched by almost every aspect of human society and human nature: war, power, money, faith, desire and ambition. . . . As in Leviathan, his highly praised book on U.S. whaling, he restores what most of us regard as an American institution to its rightful place on the international stage. The result is easily the finest tale of the [fur] trade in recent memory, a crisply written tale unburdened by excessive detail or homespun provincialism."

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