Labor and the Gift in Colonial Georgia

This paper examines the relationship between labor ideals and gift exchange in colonial Georgia. The Georgia Trustees, who founded Georgia in 1733, were determined to create a colony built not on the wealth of Gentlemen, but on “the Labour of the industrious white People, for whom the Colony was principally intended.” To facilitate the actualization of this goal, the Trustees restricted the amount of land that an individual could hold to 500 acres and outlawed the use of African-American and American-Indian slaves. This paper will argue that in lieu of attempting to control American-Indian labor and actions through slavery, Georgia officials instituted a system of gift exchange that attempted to control the labor and actions of Native Americans through expectations of reciprocity and assumptions about the power of European objects. This gift exchange system was consistent with a culture that viewed objects as vessels of, and extenders of, human labor and wrestled with whether one could usurp an object from his creator without direct compensation. The Georgians' gift-exchange partners, the Yuchi and Creek Indians, however, did not share their neighbors' culture of gift exchange or labor. They did not highlight the productive energy that created an object, nor did they use this aspect of an object's history as its primary form of identification. The contest over gift-giving and gift-use that played out between Native Americans and British officials in Georgia highlights the fact that even in a colony that disavowed a large plantation system and slavery, control over Indian bodies was still a pressing issue.