Lives in Objects

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.