John Richards was Professor of History at Duke University and editor of Land, Property and the Environment (2001). He was also coeditor of World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (1988) and Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1983). He died in 2007. John McNeill is professor of history at Georgetown University and author of several books on world and environmental history, most recently Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1640-1914 (2010).

• List of Maps and Tables Foreword by Edmund Burke Introduction by J. R. McNeill 1. Furs and Deerskins in Eastern North America 2. The Hunt for Furs in Siberia 3. Cod and the New World Fisheries 4. Whales and Walruses in the Northern Oceans Index