Trade, land, power : the struggle for eastern North America / Daniel K. Richter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Richter, Daniel K.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--First contact with other peoples.

Indians of North America.

Indians of North America--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

History.

Indians, Treatment of--North America--History.

Indians, Treatment of.

North America.

Indians of North America--Government relations.

North America--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

Indians, Treatment of--United States--History.

United States.

Physical Description:

314 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2013]

Summary:

"In this sweeping collection of essays, one of America's leading colonial historians reinterprets the struggle between Native peoples and Europeans in terms of how each understood the material basis of power. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans, trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world. The land itself was often conceived as a participant in these transactions through the blessings it bestowed on those who gave in return. For colonizers, by contrast, power tended to grow from the individual accumulation of goods and landed property more than from collective exchange--from domination more than from alliance. For many decades, an uneasy balance between the two systems of power prevailed. Tracing the messy process by which global empires and their colonial populations could finally abandon compromise and impose their definitions on the continent, Daniel K. Richter casts penetrating light on the nature of European colonization, the character of Native resistance, and the formative roles that each played in the origins of the United States."--Publisher's website.

Contents:

Introduction

Tsenacomoco and the Atlantic world : stories of goods and power

Brothers, scoundrels, metal-makers : Dutch constructions of Native American constructions of the Dutch

"That Europe be not proud, nor America discouraged" : native people and the enduring politics of trade

War and culture : the Iroquois experience

Dutch dominos : the fall of New Netherland and the reshaping of eastern North America

Brokers and politics : Iroquois and New Yorkers

Land and words : William Penn's letter to the kings of the Indians

"No savage should inherit" : native peoples, Pennsylvanians, and the origins and legacies of the Seven Years War

The plan of 1764 : Native Americans and a British empire that never was

Onas, the Long Knife : Pennsylvanians and Indians after independence

"Believing that many of the red people suffer much for the want of food" : a Quaker view of Indians in the early U.S. republic.

Notes:

A collection of previously written essays.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780812245004

0812245008

OCLC:

821217850