Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America by Daniel K. Richter

Abstract

242 Book Reviews Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America. By Daniel K. Richter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 328 pages, $45.00 Cloth. Reviewed by Kim Todt, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Trade, Land, Power contains engaging and intertwined essays by Daniel Richter on the contested notions by Europeans and Native Americans regarding political power and control of trade in North America. Richter has previously published renditions of most of the chapters as articles. However, it is constructive to have them gathered here, for the stories within this volume contribute to a growing body of scholarship on the contest between Native Americans and Europeans in early America, with a particular emphasis on the mid-Atlantic region. Richter contends historians must perceive Native Americans and Europeans equally as actors in the process in the conquest of North America. The means by which to understand this process, he maintains, is to examine the roles of trade, land, and power. Trade and power had indistinguishable links for Native Americans—exchange was intended to strengthen human connections, socially as well as materially. But Europeans misjudged the cultural significance of exchange for Native Americans. By the eighteenth century, Euro-Americans concluded that political and economic power grew from the individual pursuit of landed property rather than the exchange of goods. The essays presented are organized topically within two categories. The first group of chapters, Chapters 1 through 6, pertains to the exploration of meanings associated with European trade and Native American efforts to consolidate relationships, socially as well as materially, up to the close of the seventeenth century. Richter describes how chiefdoms in the Book Reviews 243 Chesapeake worked to incorporate European commodities into their prestige goods economy and attempted to use the new world of the Atlantic to augment the authority of their people and of themselves. He explores what Dutch people considered Indian people thought, and what such reflections intimate about intercultural relations in New Netherland and how seventeenth century cultures fashioned identity. He traces the evolving role of the Iroquois’s “mourning-war” during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as one means of restoring a degraded population and warranting social continuity. And, finally, Richter evaluates the ascendance and decline of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance and the political factions and the mediators who forged that alliance. It is in the first half of the book that Richter’s essays will have the most relevance for those interested in New York’s colonial history. Along with essays that discuss the rise and subsequent fall of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, Richter is particularly adept at appreciating the complicated and diverse local communities that existed among the Iroquois and New York colonists. The Iroquois, comprising the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, were gatherings of autonomous, kinbased , factionally divided communities. The colony of New York also lacked cohesion. Richter notes the colony comprised localized communities (both Dutch and English) held together by networks of personal and familial political connections. Subsequent to the final English takeover of New York in 1674, brokers or mediators arose in both groups to establish interdependent relationships with the other. The second half of the book, Chapters 7 through 11, examines the manner in which European settlers rendered immaterial Native American interpretations of trade and power. Europeans introduced land into the equation, which came to dominate the relationship between Europeans and Native Americans. Here, Richter underscores how the nascent actions within North America at the start of the Seven Years’ War had a direct correlation to the collapse in relations between Native Americans and colonists within Pennsylvania before the 1750s. He charts a pattern in which colonial authorities envisioned, in subsequent political land redistributions , no permanent place for independent Native peoples. Other visions of empire also existed and Richter also evaluates the Board of Trade’s 1764 plan of an imperial empire, which advocated a scheme in which 244 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Native Americans and Europeans might coexist. Native Americans in Pennsylvania, after the American Revolution, sought to retain land for traditional activities and Richter surveys how they appealed to Pennsylvania’s political leadership to reengage with the presumed ideals of William Penn. And to...