Skip to Main Content

Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast

Online ISBN:
9781469631509
Print ISBN:
9781469631486
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast

Jessica Yirush Stern
Jessica Yirush Stern
California State University, Fullerton
Find on
Published online:
21 September 2017
Published in print:
20 February 2017
Online ISBN:
9781469631509
Print ISBN:
9781469631486
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

The Lives in Objects presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, which is equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and the consumption of goods. It challenges long-standing assumptions about Native American and European economic cultures in Early America, particularly the dichotomy that other scholars have drawn between gift-giving (associated with native pre-capitalist economies) and commodity exchange (associated with colonial market economies). This interpretation has tended to cast Native Americans as unwitting victims drawn into and made dependent on a trans-Atlantic marketplace. This book complicates that picture by showing how both sides (Southeastern Indian and British American) mixed gift-giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, so much so that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard scholarly interpretation accords them. The result is a much more nuanced view of the trade and its impact on the economic and material lives of Southeastern Indian and British individuals. In this pursuit, this book also complicates the deerskin trade from the British perspective, showing that royal and colonial governments were not as willing to embrace modern free market values as we might assume.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close