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.
