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. “Havard shows what a great historian can do with this vast, profuse, and ambivalent topic. . . . Evident throughout is Havard’s scholarly versatility; his use, that is, of the methods and insights of different disciplines and fields of study like social, political, and business history, anthropology, folklore, and linguistic analysis. . . . Havard’s learning is multi-faceted 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. . . . Havard’s succession of precise, smart, and varied interpretations add up to form a remarkably comprehensive view of fur traders and the essentially dissonant enterprise they were engaged in. The book’s achievement is evident.”―Paul Mapp, Books and Ideas.net “Provides researchers with a comprehensive synthesis of North American ‘coureurs de bois’ and represents an impressive body of scholarship. . . . The abundant richness of this research work is reflected in the exploitation of a vast and diversified documentary corpus through the meticulous examination of archival documents, memoirs, journals, diaries, travel narratives that complement and sometimes challenge or contradict the already existing secondary sources.”― Journal of Early American History “[ Empire of Pelts ] tells a dramatic history of otherness, cross-cultural struggle, violence, hate, diplomacy, accommodation, geopolitical contestation, and war with verve and keen eye for detail. . . . [This is an] ambitious, expansive, nuanced, and mature work, and it should have a galvanizing and enduring impact on North American historical scholarship.”―Pekka Hämäläinen, author of Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 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).