1 The Economic Activity of Native Americans in British North America

Do Native American Indians fit into early American economic history? Judging by the existing literature that describes the economy of the colonial period, the answer would be no. Instead, American economic history focusing on the pre-Revolutionary period concentrates on the activities of Europeans and, to a far lesser extent, on the African-Americans whom Europeans brought to the Western Hemisphere as slaves. On those rare occasions when Indians do appear, their economies1 receive little sustained attention; Native Americans appear in fleeting references to the fur trade, for example, and historians mention their demographic catastrophe as the tragic counterweight to the demographic miracle of the colonial population.2 Leading textbooks on American economic history provide scant coverage of anything to do with the full range of Indians' economic behavior.3 The extraordinary debate on whether early Americans were market-oriented, which has generated an enormous outpouring of scholarship, has unfolded as if Native Americans did not exist despite the fact that the trade in furs or deerskins took place in every colony at some point or another.4 The publication in January 1999 of a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly --an issue that contains a group of superb articles on a variety of topics relating to the early American economy yet virtually nothing on Indians--reflects the unstated consensus view that American Indians somehow do not fit into prevailing conceptions about economic development.5 Even recent efforts focused on Indians provide little in the way of a substantive overview of Native Americans' economy during the colonial period.6 But there is no reason that Indians should be excluded from historians' and economists' depictions of the early American economy. After all, the exclusion of Indians has not resulted from any careful methodological consideration (based on advances in anthropology or ethnohistory) of the fact that many Indians did not hold the same economic values as colonists. Though Calvin Martin did raise that precise issue in his pathbreaking Keepers of the Game (published in 1978), debate on that book concentrated on his assessment of the relationship between Subarctic Indians and epidemic diseases and not his assertions about different economic attitudes held by Indians.7 Further, though Indians' economic behavior left scarcer traces in the documentary record than their political views or diplomatic overtures, historians and economists have long demonstrated that it is possible to examine even fleeting references, barely intelligible documents, or even the many silences in the extant record. The venerable debate about why Indians chose to engage in trade with Europeans suggests that much can be deduced about 4 Indians' economic behavior and attitudes,download