Trade, Land, Power

In this sweeping collection of essays, one of America's leading colonial historians reinterprets the struggle between Native peoples and Europeans in terms of how each understood the material basis of power. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans, trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world. The land itself was often conceived as a participant in these transactions through the blessings it bestowed on those who gave in return. For colonizers, by contrast, power tended to grow from the individual accumulation of goods and landed property more than from collective exchange-from domination more than from alliance. For many decades, an uneasy balance between the two systems of power prevailed. Tracing the messy process by which global empires and their colonial populations could finally abandon compromise and impose their definitions on the continent, Daniel K. Richter casts penetrating light on the nature of European colonization, the character of Native resistance, and the formative roles that each played in the origins of the United States.

Autorentext

Daniel K. Richter

Inhalt

Introduction

PART I. NATIVE POWER AND EUROPEAN TRADE
Chapter 1. Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic World: Stories of Goods and Power
Chapter 2. Brothers, Scoundrels, Metal-Makers: Dutch Constructions of Native American Constructions of the Dutch
Chapter 3. "That Europe be not Proud, nor America Discouraged": Native People and the Enduring Politics of Trade
Chapter 4. War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience
Chapter 5. Dutch Dominos: The Fall of New Netherland and the Reshaping of Eastern North America
Chapter 6. Brokers and Politics: Iroquois and New Yorkers

PART II. EUROPEAN POWER AND NATIVE LAND
Chapter 7. Land and Words: William Penn's Letter to the Kings of the Indians
Chapter 8. "No Savage Should Inherit": Native Peoples, Pennsylvanians, and the Origins and Legacies of the Seven Years War
Chapter 9. The Plan of 1764: Native Americans and a British Empire That Never Was
Chapter 10. Onas, the Long Knife: Pennsylvanians and Indians After Independence
Chapter 11. "Believing that Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food": A Quaker View of Indians in the Early U.S. Republic

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments