The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans

Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

“…Almost uniformly, writings on colonial American currencies describe the lack of institutional infrastructure in Euroamerica as the key difference between the American colonial and English economic environments (Nettels 1973; Priest 2001; Carruthers and Ariovich 2010; cf. Miller and Hamell 1986; Salisbury 1996). However, the literature does not remark, as it might, on the significance of indigenous presence and the unique dynamics of trade between groups with unshared basic premises about money, trade, land, and the world.…”

“…However, exchange between tribes continued to be “articulated in the language of gift giving”; it expressed political, diplomatic relations and had the capacity to articulate collective relationships between sovereignties 17 . Even when indigenous people sought out European goods, such as kettles, glassware, or textiles, they did so for their similarity in substance to other materials they already valued, qualifying them by Indian, rather than by European “schemes of value” (Miller and Hamell 1986, 318; Salisbury 1996, 452–53). “In effect, they became different objects,” whose significance Europeans did not fully understand (Weeden 1884, 13; Cronon 1983, 94); as historian Jean O'Brien (1997, 6) has written, “Indians incorporated new items of material culture selectively and in Indian ways.” Fur traders found that no matter the circumstance, “nothing like the European equation could be established”: “[t]here was no question of setting a quantity of spirits against a quantity of furs” (Rich 1960, 50).…”