Reviews of Books

This volume is the seventh in a series emanating from the periodic gatherings of the North American Fur Trade Conference. First held in 1965 and meeting every five or six years since, the conferences have brought together a wide range of researchers from across North America. They have fostered interdisciplinary understandings of the fur trade that reach beyond familiar images of frontier business and colonial agency in the European occupation of North America. The authors represented in these volumes have explored the trade as an arena of many kinds of encounter, linking native peoples, outsider traders and trappers, merchant-capitalists, and European consumers in complex relations that transformed North American environments, peoples, and ways of life. Their subjects have included, among others, economic and labor history, gender relations, intercultural contacts, and documentary analyses of fur trade texts. Freely crossing boundaries among academic fields, the conferences have helped to generate a literature of considerable scope and sophistication.

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The seventh North American Fur Trade Conference was held in 1995 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a site far removed from the old centers of the trade in the continental interior, where conferees have previously met. Like its predecessors, the conference offered sessions that were wide-ranging in their coverage and approaches. This volume presents a highly selected sample of what transpired--fifteen papers out of forty submitted for review. Evidently, Michigan State University Press wished for a slimmer book than the Sixth Fur Trade Conference volume, with its twenty-eight papers and 500-plus pages, that this reviewer co-edited with W. J. Eccles and Donald P. Heldman (The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991 [East Lansing, 1994]). The editors--Jo-Anne Fiske, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and William Wicken--also chose with a further purpose. Affirming that the Halifax meeting "constituted a critical moment in the historiography of the North American fur trade," they seized that moment "to reevaluate the direction of fur trade scholarship" (p. vii): This volume questions the traditional focus of fur trade literature. New Faces . . . contends that there are richer, more diverse narratives that suggest alternative ways to look at the trade. Many of the fifteen papers . . . raise subjects and themes that have either been formerly overlooked or have been introduced and then neglected. Fur trade studies have been criticized for remaining outside the current mainstream of historiography, in particular for paying scant attention to the rich insights revealed by the field of social history. This volume seeks to redress some of those omissions [p. 1].

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