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The Economic Philosophies of Indian Trade Regulation Policy in Early South Carolina Jessica Stern Carolina was established during an unsettled time in England’s economic history . The expansion of the market over unprecedented distances, and the emergence of a philosophy that posited that labor and not land created wealth, sparked debates about the role of government in economic affairs. Under scrutiny was the balance-of-trade theory, or mercantilism, which assumed that because global economic resources were based in land and thus finite, the sovereign needed to monopolize control over international trade to ensure that his country was retaining the greatest amount of wealth. In addition to limited resources , regulation of trade was necessary, many traditionally argued, because individuals who dealt primarily in moveable goods and owned minimal landed property were untrustworthy; unmanaged, they might harm a nation’s security when dealing with foreign trading partners.1 The attack on the premises that underpinned the balance-of-trade theory, and the accompanying uncertainty of the place of the government in economic affairs, came into sharp relief in proprietary South Carolina during debates about the trade with Native Americans. Carolina’s planners imagined their future colony as a plantation, operating according to a traditional economic model of landed property. True to the balance-of-trade goal of amassing global resources, Carolina would assist England in accumulating specie by supplying it, and its colonists in Barbados, with the agricultural goods they needed to become self-sufficient, so they could minimize their imports, and provide luxuries to England that they could sell to foreign countries.2 Carolina’s framers toed the line that the only true independent citizen was he who held land; mobile property, on the other hand, created artificial men whose appetites for power had to be governed.3 While a colony based in landed property served as the ideal model for Carolina , it soon became clear that slaves captured by and deerskins harvested by Native Americans, and not fruit from the land, were the only ready sources of revenue in the southeast.4 Most of these skins and slaves were transacted between Native Americans and transient settlers. The economic realities of South 98 Jessica Stern Carolina forced settlers and officials alike to assess the debates occurring in England and presents a microcosm of how a society dedicated to landed property would react to an economy based in goods that moved across international boundaries.5 In analyzing how the colonists engaged with the ideologies of mercantilism, this essay adds to the chorus of scholars who argue that rather than originating from the center, economic policies were the product of negotiations between the metropole and peripheries.6 As this essay shows, after an early period of very loosely regulated trade, the South Carolina proprietors and Commons House reacted to uncertainties in the Native American trade by moving away from a freer-trade model and instituting tight regulations on prices, trading locations, and trade partners, thereby reaffirming traditional economic mores. Historians who have discussed these regulations, and Native American conceptions of exchange more generally, argue that Native Americans, who traditionally exchanged goods as gifts, insisted on these policies because they were uncomfortable with market commodity exchanges.7 By situating the Native American trade in early modern English economic debates, I show that the English were as uneasy as the Native Americans, and possibly even more so, about expanding markets and cross-cultural traders, and that they insisted on the regulations that historians mistakenly attribute solely to Native American pressure. Though Carolina’s planners did not intend for trade with Native Americans to hold a central place within their economy, as the first settlers’ provisions dwindled they “were forced to live upon the Indians,” creating a system in which casual trade with the Native Americans for food and deerskin clothing touched the lives of almost everyone during the first decades after South Carolina ’s founding.8 For the settlers these exchanges were inextricably linked to social and diplomatic relationships. Peaceful neighbors were those who traded with them; menacing neighbors were those who refused to trade. In addition the settlers were surprised that these foreign nations, who they expected to use trade to fill their own coffers at their expense, as the English did, acted generously. Proprietor Lord Ashley’s deputy Stephen Bull reported that they “sould vs Provisions att very reasonable rates & takeinge notice of our necessitys did almost daylie bringe one thing or another.”9 Similarly settler William Owen relayed that their indigenous...

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