Fashionable Felted Fur: A World History of the Beaver Hat

Kelly Feinstein-Johnson (University of California, Santa Cruz)

This essay has been taken directly from Kelly Feinstein-Johnson's website and historical research project entitled Fashionable Felted Fur: A World History of the Beaver Hat. The project is a product of a Winter 2006 graduate seminar in World History at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is an attempt to write a world history of the felted beaver hat using ‘a commodity approach’ to world history. It seeks to connect the seemingly disparate stories of Native American and European trappers in North America, a Russian pelt-combing trade secret, changing conditions of labor for men and women in the French hatting industries, and conspicuous consumption in seventeenth-century England. The basic idea is that one can trace world histories by focusing on the production and consumption of one commodity, trade good, or other physical item. The commodity provides a focus form the project and allows the historian to build a historical narrative that is simultaneously from ‘the bottom up’ (looking at the men and women whose labor went into production, and whose gold and silver went into consumption), and ‘the top down’ (turning to a bird’s-eye view of trade routes and the development of the early modern global economy).

This essay is divided into multiple sections, all of which focus on the production and consumption of the beaver hat in early modern North America and Europe. The basic organization is:

Making a Beaver Hat: Information on how beaver hats were made and an explanation of the term ‘mad as a hatter’.

The Fur Trade: A bird’s-eye view of the beaver trade through the seventeenth century.

Case Studies 1-3: Whereas 'The Fur Trade' presents the big view, these three case studies present three examples of smaller-scale histories that are nonetheless united by the production and consumption demands of this one animal. It is important to recognize that although these local histories take place on different continents with seemingly unrelated historical actors, the changes in each locale affect and are affected by changes in the others.