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.