Student Question
How did the Europeans trade with Native peoples, and did the Native peoples perceive it similarly?
Quick answer:
It is difficult to say who got a "good deal" in the complex trading arrangements between Native peoples and Europeans. What can be said is that both sides understood trade in very different terms, and both derived their own benefits and frustrations from trade.
"Natives peoples" and "Europeans" are very broad categories, and even if we limit the answer to North America, trade was very complex and changed over time. The short answer to this is that both Native peoples and Europeans entered into trade relationships with their own cultural expectations about what trade meant.
The idea that Europeans felt they "got a good deal" is not generally true. They felt especially annoyed at the Native peoples' expectation—almost universal—that trade was a reciprocal relationship between peoples who had entered into bonds of fictive kinship with each other. Natives often demanded presents from Europeans before they would even begin to discuss formal trade relationships. Many Europeans saw this as extortionate, but cutting Native peoples off from presents was a surefire way to invite diplomatic disaster. This was largely because some Native leaders rose to prominence based on their ability to secure goods from Europeans, especially...
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When it came to exchanges of land, another cultural misunderstanding came into play. Natives peoples did not understand land ownership in the same way Europeans did. When they sold or ceded land, they were granting Europeans the right to use it. This concept existed in Europe—it was known as usufruct—but Europeans still saw these deals as conferring complete ownership in perpetuity.
Though it is difficult to see it this way in retrospect, Native peoples often saw the arrival of Europeans as a boon, because they could gain access to trade goods like guns, cloth, and metal tools. In some cases, they went to war with other groups to secure these rights, even attacking Europeans who violated the terms of trade agreements. European demands could often be very disruptive. In South Carolina, for example, thousands of Indian people were taken captive in slave raids and were sold off for a lifetime of slavery in the Caribbean. This profoundly destabilized the region, leading to the destructive Yamassee War that almost destroyed the colony. Similarly, the deerskin trade disrupted life in the region in the eighteenth century, and the beaver trade led to endemic wars among peoples in the Great Lakes region.
Overall, for the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century, Native peoples dictated the terms of trade (and diplomacy) in North America. Indeed, Europeans were incorporated into trade networks that long predated their arrival. As time wore on and Europeans came into control of more and more of North America, this dynamic changed. Some Native groups became dependent on European trade goods, including alcohol. Many merchants gained direct access to Indian towns and villages by marriage into powerful matrilineal clans.
But throughout the colonial period, if we look at trade from both a Native and a European perspective, it is difficult to say who got a "good deal" in trade. Both sides entered trade arrangements with differing expectations about what trade was. While this frequently proved a source of frustration for both sides, it also meant that both took different things away from these "deals."
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