This paper examines the Euro-Indigenous fur trade in northeastern North America, following Carlson's use of Chase-Dunn and Hall's nested interaction networks to examine a similar trade during roughly the same time period on the continent's other side. These network interactions took place on what became a contested periphery, and they shaped the development of states and the modem world-system , with Europeans contending with each other and with Native Americans for political and economic control, and at times mere survival. European politicalmilitary networks were essential to maintaining colonies, and in contrast to what the general interaction networks model posits, these were made up of or at least coterminous with nested prestige goods networks. Europeans were initially dependent upon prestige goods networks with Native Americans; indeed , the French political military network in North America was arguably formed by ( or at least supported by) the various Franco-Indigenous prestige goods networks. The French, Dutch, and British all attempted to transition their colonial economies from the extractive economies and low settler population densities typically associated with prestige goods networks to the agricultural economies and higher settler population densities of bulk goods networks. The paper traces the attempted colonial interaction network transitions from contested peripheries within Euro-Indigenous prestige goods networks to settled colonies within bulk goods networks and firmly within a given core powers' imperial political military network. The success ( or failure) of these network transitions helped determine the Euroamerican colonies ' geopolitical futures in the world-economy, as well as those of their indigenous neighbors and their struggles for physical survival and political sovereignty.
The Calumet & Hecla Copper Company was a firm funded by core capital, but operating in an internal periphery (Michigans Upper Peninsula), and eventually subject to peripheral constraints, along with the constraints of the physical environment, the physical characteristics of copper, and a concentrating industrial structure itself due largely to the physical characteristics of other types of copper mined elsewhere in the world. I focus on the firms efforts to maintain market access in the face of both a restructuring copper industry, driven by the coming online of much larger, lower-grade deposits that required much larger aggregations of capital to extract and process; and a restructuring transport system, driven by coppers industrial restructuring, but also by the politics of core and periphery within the U.S., including the imperatives of transport capital that tied peripheral resources to core manufacturing industry. A number of world-systems works over the past decade have examined periphery-core resource transport, exploring its importance to historical capitalism via increasing the speed and scope of circulation, improving access to raw materials, and being a leading sector for rising hegemons, due to the ever-increasing need for raw materials entailed by economic ascent. The case examined here was part of the United States own core emergence and eventual hegemonic ascendance, which was largely based on its domestic raw materials and the internal transport lines that enabled core industry to gain cheap access to those resources.
Traditional approaches to the political economy of tariffs usually examine formal politics within the state or look at the economic interests of the producers involved. World-systems approaches to tariffs try to integrate the two approaches, by examining how economic interests fit into the world-economy, and how this influences their politics. Despite being a little-remembered piece of Reconstruction-era legislation, the 1869 copper tariff allows an opportunity to reexamine an episode of the United States' development within a world-systems context and help to broaden our understanding of the politics behind its emergence as an industrial power. Simultaneously, it allows us to explore the salient physical and technological issues that underlie natural resource tariffs.
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