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Chapter 3 "That Europe be not Proud, nor America Discouraged": Native People and the Enduring Politics of Trade
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Chapter 3 “That Europe Be not Proud, nor America Discouraged”: Native People and the Enduring Politics of Trade Like the writings of Harmen Meyndersz van den Bogaert or John Smith, the works of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, constructed compli‑ cated images of Native people. And like those of the others, his images con‑ veyed real, if convoluted, insights. “O the infinite wisedome of the most holy wise God, who hath so advanced Europe above America, that there is not a sorry Howe, Hatchet, Knife, nor a rag of cloth in all America, but what comes over the dreadfull Atlantick Ocean from Europe,” Williams wrote in A Key into the Language of America (1643). “And yet that Europe be not proud, nor America discouraged,” one need only ask, “What treasures are hid in some parts of America, and in our New English parts, how have foule hands (in smoakie houses) the first handling of those Furres which are after worne upon the hands of Queens and heads of Princes?”1 We might well wonder whether divine wisdom had anything to do with it or just which of the trad‑ ing partners’ hands were more foul, but there is no questioning Williams’s central point about how early, and how deeply, eastern North American Na‑ tive people engaged in the world of Atlantic commerce. Opechancanough of Tsenacomoco, no less than van den Bogaert of New Netherland, understood that well. And so, for historians, Native American involvement with what Timothy Breen calls (in a very different context) “an empire of goods” is a familiar story.2 It has been difficult, however, to find ways to make Native Americans rather than Europeans central actors in that drama or to tell it as anything 54 Native Power and European Trade other than a relentless progression toward economic dependence, imperial subjection, and cultural decline. The fate of Powhatan’s Tsenacomoco chief‑ dom seems to follow that narrative arc. Yet closer attention to the continued evolving roles of material goods in the political economies of eastern Native North America suggests a different— although not necessarily prettier— plot line. For many generations, for better or worse, imported goods continued to function within Native communities more as flexible sources of power than as markers of creeping dependence on the imperial juggernaut of the Atlantic economy. * * * Historian James Axtell, in an essay on “The First Consumer Revolution” (1992), emphasized that Native peoples were participants in a global economy and careful purchasers of not just any hoes, hatchets, knives, and rags but of Assemblage of Susquehannock Trade Goods, Courtesy of the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Clockwise from the left are a rum bottle, beads, a spoon, a snuffbox, glass beads and a Swedish ce‑ ramic bowl, brass kettles, a flintlock musket mechanism, a metal harpoon, a cut Delft ceramic disk, brass arrowheads, iron axe heads, a jaw harp, and tobacco pipes. :39 GMT) The Enduring Politics of Trade 55 tools, weapons, and duffle cloth specifically tailored to their tastes. Earlier, Francis Jennings, in The Invasion of America (1975), rightly stressed Native peoples’ active roles as producers in a global “extractive industry.” Supply as well as demand, then, made Indian people actors in the Atlantic economy. Still, for Axtell, Jennings, and those who followed in their footsteps, Indian agency almost disappeared in a broader tale of Native subordination within a European‑ dominated global economy. “Most Indians in colonial America . . . were . . . dragged into dependence and debt,” Axtell concluded. Similarly, Jen‑ nings declared, “Although the trade was as eagerly sought by Indians as by Europeans . . . in the long run it helped to make Europeans dominant and Indians dependent.”3 “In the long run,” the trajectory that Axtell and Jennings traced is correct; the Atlantic world of commerce surely contains what Richard White memo‑ rably calls The Roots of Dependency.4 Exchanges that began with the swapping of a few rare glass beads or bits of metal for beaver skins that were nearly as rare to the Europeans who received them seemingly inevitably evolved first into a trade for raw materials such as metal and cloth to be reworked into new forms, then into a commerce in goods that were substituted wholesale for tra‑ ditional items—copper kettles for earthenware pots, iron axes for stone chop‑ pers, firearms for bows and arrows— then ultimately into Axtell’s consumer revolution.5 Everywhere in eastern North America, Native people came rap‑ idly to rely on transatlantic commerce for weapons...