“In this thoroughly researched and well-written study, Catherine Cangany shows how the people of late-eighteenth-century Detroit participated fully in a vibrant Atlantic economy. Indeed, she demonstrates persuasively that traditional notions of a simple life on the frontier do not hold for this settlement. Detroit’s entrepreneurs—Native Americans as well as Europeans—developed exciting new trade goods, such as moccasins, that sustained a sophisticated level of commerce. Frontier Seaport is an impressive and challenging accomplishment.”
— T. H. Breen, author of Marketplace of Revolution
“Frontier Seaport tells the story of Detroit’s evolution from an isolated fur trading post to an inland seaport that dominated commerce on the upper Great Lakes. Cangany stretches our notions of Atlantic history to include a community 650 miles inland from the coast, reconstructing the flow of people and commodities that gave Detroit its unique intercultural and cosmopolitan character. Although nominally subject to five different regimes between 1701 and 1837, the native and colonial peoples of Detroit persistently defied imperial pretensions to sovereignty over them. Cangany’s skillful reconstruction of their economic, social, and political lives forces us to reconsider what it meant to live on a colonial borderland in early America.”
— Timothy J. Shannon, Gettysburg College
“Catherine Cangany’s marvelous new book on Detroit excavates a previously unappreciated history of a fascinating place. Across a period of more than a century, Cangany traces the evolution of Detroit’s economic and political activity in a series of fine-grained layers. In the process, she succeeds in detailing the distinctive character of a unique community: an inland frontier seaport that was tied to Atlantic patterns of cosmopolitan culture but was also shaped by its location in a border region that brought together Native Americans, French and British colonists, and Americans across shifting political boundaries in fluid patterns of exchange and adaptation. It is an impressive achievement.”
— Eric Hinderaker, University of Utah
"Catherine Cangany's wonderful new book explores the tensions between localism and cosmopolitanism in early Detroit by creatively juxtaposing the concerns of recent scholars of North American borderlands and Atlantic commerce. Delineating Detroit's extensive connections with places far beyond the Great Lakes, Cangany gives us merchants, consumers, and smugglers whose behavior subverts familiar categories of analysis and demands that historians think in fresh ways."
— Andrew Cayton, Miami University
"Cangany is one of a trio of young historians who are finally providing a new portrait of one of colonial America’s most fascinating places—Detroit! At once a frontier town, a seaport connected to the Atlantic World, and a bustling trading center with an incredibly diverse population, Detroit at the end of the eighteenth century was a city-in-waiting where one might see a bear ambling down the main street or find the latest Paris fashions. Anyone interested in frontier history, native studies, urban history, and the period of transition from empire to republic (territorial government under federal appointees) will profit mightily from reading this sparkling portrait of early Detroit. Chapter three relates the history of the moccasin trade, which begins in Detroit as a local cottage industry reflecting the city’s hybrid culture and develops into a national fad from the 1790s to the 1830s. Marketed as a ‘health aid’ as well as a quintessentially American, western, and native fashion statement, moccasins reinforced Detroit’s continuing integration into the Atlantic-World marketplace. This brilliant and fascinating chapter alone is worth the price of admission. This is history at its best: surprising, entertaining, fresh, and informative. It will challenge your stereotypes about Detroit and reaffirm your interest in the frontier. Enough biographies of the same old political figures! Buy several copies of Frontier Seaport and give them to your friends. You’ll be glad you did. Highly recommended for all students, young and old, of American History."
— Jay Gitlin, author of The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion
“An excellent monograph that positions the history of French, British, and American Detroit during the 18th and early 19th centuries within the historiographies of continental and Atlantic history. . . . Highly recommended.”
— Choice
“Cangany offers a stunning new way of understanding the hybrid character of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Detroit. . . . through intensive archival research, Cangany arrives at a sophisticated conceptualization of the city’s historical character. . . . a fresh, illuminating, and most welcome addition to the study of early Detroit.”
— Journal of American History
“Cangany uses masterful research to recover this forgotten chapter of Detroit’s past. . . . Cangany’s clever historical detective work results in at least two genuine breakthroughs. . . . Frontier Seaport is easily the most important study of Detroit from the mid-eighteenth century to Michigan statehood in 1837.”
— American Historical Review