Session Abstract

Trade fundamentally transformed Native and Colonial life and has been identified as one of the most powerful elements of change associated with the contact period. This panel places individual Indian and European traders from the Chesapeake to Georgia into the larger narrative of Southern history by examining the colonial record from an ethnohistorical vantage point to tell the “story” from a Native and European perspective.  Specifically, it examines Anglo-Indian interaction as a central role in the development of the colonial South. The papers in this panel look at the contact period and focus on early trade relationships and their role in the development of unique trade partnerships in the region. Anglo-Native interaction remained a key component of Southeastern history throughout the colonial era.  Commerce was one element that brought Indians and colonists together, but the Indian trade had implications far beyond the economic realm.  Politics, daily life, violence, worldviews, settlement patterns—the very history of the region—hinged on the relations that natives and traders forged together.  Exploring the Indian trade in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, this panel traces the importance of the activity, the people involved in it, and the relationships shaped by it, ultimately highlighting the role that trading partners had in shaping larger cultural interactions.  These papers collectively link the different temporal and geographical locales that made up the colonial Southeast and, as a result, uncover patterns, anomalies, and new directions to consider regarding violence, diplomacy, and cultural interaction on the broader colonial frontier.