The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717

Abstract

The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. By Alan Gallay. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii, 444. Preface, acknowledgments, note on text and terminology, introduction, map, afterword, notes, index. $35.00, cloth; $18.00, paper.) Alan Gallay provides the first detailed examination of the Indian slave trade in the colonial American South. The trade developed from indigenous slaving practices after European settlers arrived and demanded inexpensive labor. Gallay carefully reconstructs the shifting web of alliances and hostilities that characterized the slave trade and examines its impacts on colonial European as well as southeastern Indian communities. Gallay focuses on England's South Carolina colony from its settlement in 1670 until the aftermath of the 1715 Yamassee war, yet he ranges widely in examining the trade's entanglements. The central thesis is that the Indian slave trade dominated economic relations between English, French, and Spanish colonies and the region's many indigenous groups. For Gallay, the region's single most prized economic resource was human labor, the control of which profoundly affected other social, cultural, and political institutions. The book begins with a review of Indian slavery during pre-contact times, when it was, for the most part, a social institution for assimilating captured members of rival communities. Following English colonization of the Atlantic seaboard, indigenous slave practices reached a peak between 1670 and 1685, as Indians from farther north moved into Virginia and Carolina and began to compete with indigenous groups for land and other resources. The development of lucrative new opportunities to trade captured slaves to English proprietors fueled this competition. Participation in this new Indian slave trade catapulted some groups, such as the Yamassees, to positions of considerable wealth and power. Gallay then traces the expansion of the Indian slave trade during the first years of the eighteenth century, when its influence spread to Spanish Florida as well as into the Mississippi Valley, where French explorers and missionaries were beginning to establish a presence. Indian groups across the Southeast attempted to utilize the slave trade as a means both to procure useful goods and to strike back at traditional enemies. In this context, Indians and Europeans created new institutions for collaboration, but Gallay argues that these chiefly took the form of military alliances that had devastating impacts on the native communities. In the Carolinas, conflicts for control of the slave trade also emerged, which gave rise to alternative views of Indians as illustrated by the dissimilar observations of two itinerate traders, John Stuart and Thomas Nairne. …