contact, incorporation, and the north american southeast I n this study, I focus on those aspects of world-system expansion involved in its intrusion into new areas-the "broadening" of the world-economy-and the point at which we can reasonably say that the formerly external areas had been incorporated into the world-economy. Using the southeastern portion of North America as a case of world-system incorporation, this research seeks to contribute to the incorporation debate by focusing specifi cally on the social organization and relations that characterized the people who occupied the region prior to European contact and how contact with the world-system altered those social formations. Importantly, this research builds on the often-overlooked contribution of its initial expansion and contact with formerly external areas to the newly emerging capitalist world-system where others have tended to focus instead on the eff ect of colonization of the area after 1606. I rely on previously published records of sixteenth-century European explorations of the region along with contemporary archaeological fi ndings. Th e fi ndings suggest that during the sixteenth century the area not only contributed resources to the world-economy-most often in the form of relations, not necessarily formalized, supplyingThe broadening of the world-system, which involves the geographic expansion into previously external areas and integration of new economies into its network of economic relationships, is represented in world-system scholarship by two competing views. On the one hand, Wallerstein and his associates treat incorporation as being specifically contingent on the routine and systematic economic exchange for durable goods produced in the previously external area to the benefit of the core. In contrast, Hall and Chase-Dunn contend that incorporation is a synchronous process that takes different forms depending on the relative locations within the hierarchical world-economy of both the previously external areas and the "incorporating" area. Using the sixteenth-century North American Southeast as an episode of incorporation, this study examines the contact relationship between early European explorers and the indigenous groups in the formerly external area. My goal is to illuminate more fully how contact may permanently alter the social organization and relations within the region and, consequently, the form taken by subsequent integration into the world-system.
abstract:* I would like to express my appreciation to my colleague Larry Kuznar and the reviewers at JWSR for their helpful comments and suggestions on this article. Please direct all questions and comments to Shirley Hollis.
Both before and during the US Civil War, political rhetoric in the northern states had a markedly radical tone that gave Southern blacks every reason to expect that they would be rewarded with 'forty acres and a mule' at the end of the war, along with some measure of economic independence. Instead, freedmen were cast out across the landscape, most with no material possessions other than the clothes on their back. The current article offers a critical analysis of the structural and ideological forces that shaped American policy in the post-Civil War period and deprived the freedmen of promised resources that were vital to their gaining independence and, subsequently, to developing on a par with their white counterparts. This analysis suggests that these forces can best be understood within the context of the unique set of ideologies that were -and continue to be -the very backbone of Western capitalism.
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