The Lives in Objects

This well-written book deals with the exchange of goods between southeastern Indians and British colonists from their first encounter until the 1750s. Continuously comparing behaviors of the two peoples, Stern focuses on general patterns throughout the entire period. Her Indians are Cherokees and especially Creeks; her colonists are those of Georgia and especially South Carolina. Trained as a historian, she is strongly influenced by the insights of anthropologists.Many previous scholars of the region have noted that some goods changed hands as gifts and others as commodities. According to Stern, most of these scholars did not consider these goods carefully enough to avoid a major misunderstanding. In her view, “the predominant historiography depicting Native Americans as gift givers and the Europeans as modern economic actors” is much overdrawn (1). She elucidates this point in four topical chapters—“Production,” “Commodity Exchange,” “Gift Exchange,” and “Consumption of Commodities.”At the outset, Stern observes that no previous historian has “compared the meaning of labor in Southeastern Indian and British colonial societies” (19). She easily shows that Lockean economic theory strongly influenced the colonists. Individual effort created value and private property, and markets regulated communities. The Indian “theory of labor” is more elusive, almost an anti-theory (37). She argues that for Indians, it was not time and effort that created value and property. Rather, it was proper attention to community tradition and ritual that led to a “productive” hunt or harvest.Forecasting the main issue of her middle chapters, Stern invokes the anthropological insight that “gift givers often expect their presents to harbor their identities and to be used in a particular way; commodities rarely carry similar obligations” (4). She finds this explanation cogent but limited: “The similarities between gift and commodity exchange outnumber their differences” (2). Critically, both demand reciprocity. Indian and colonist behaviors were alike in many ways. The British chose trade goods for Indians to match native tastes but intended gifts of laced coats or shoes as “vehicle[s] for assimilation” (99). To avoid obligation, both sides tried to treat gifts received as anonymous commodities. The exchange system that developed “did not pit Native Americans against British settlers. Rather, it was ordinary Native American individuals and settlers who forged ahead toward a more modern economic model” based on free trade (92). The one glaring omission in Stern’s discussion of gifts is that land cessions from Indians to the British during this period were not real-estate transactions. The parties did not bargain over price. Instead, the treaties record that lands were proffered and received as gifts.Stern’s shortest chapter is probably her best. Although most historians have little to say about goods after the moment of exchange, she moves ahead to discuss consumption: “In a commodity exchange, the customer chooses the item transacted, whereas in a gift exchange the giver determines the object to be bestowed”—but not how that object will be consumed (129). Colonists often sold native crafted gifts in public markets; Indians likewise paid little attention to how colonists thought their gifts should be used. For example, most guns came to southeastern Indians as official gifts, but regardless of how the Indians acquired them, they refused to use them as weapons in the service of the British Empire. They also repurposed many of the commodities that they acquired, such as the copper pots that they sliced into pieces to become personal ornaments.The historical work that Stern singles out as particularly misleading is Richard White’s influential The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, 1983): “White concluded that Southeastern Indian social structure became dependent on European goods, to the detriment of indigenous societies” (160). She disagrees, mainly about detriment. Native leaders were not enfeebled; they transformed themselves into “overseers of commerce” (46). If ordinary Indians lost some skills, they gained new ones. Stern, however, minimizes dependence unduly. Native Americans were not only unavoidably dependent on Europeans for raw materials that they could not obtain locally; they were also voluntarily dependent on them for foreign manufactures. As she briefly notes, Indians did not seek to fabricate textiles or other European articles for themselves. They only did so when the U.S. government pressured them after 1790.Stern concludes that her book “is not a history that permits us to explain the fissures between Southeastern Indians and colonists by pinpointing cultural differences.... Shifts in power, rather than shifts in culture, better explain the mounting tensions” between them (161). This idea is defensible, but her previous chapters do not entail it. Moreover, the “predominant historiography” of British–Indian exchange is less bipolar than she maintains. Although the book repeatedly challenges received opinion, its main value lies in adding refinements to it

Ancient history · Colonialism · Commodity · Consumption (sociology) · Economics · Economy · Historiography · Market economy · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Stern · Value (mathematics) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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