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Title
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Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783
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Date
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1992
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Bibliographic Citation
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Usner, Daniel H. Jr. 1992. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
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annotates
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Usner’s 1992 book is a regional study of economic activity in the Louisiana colony from 1699 to 1783. Usner (1992:6) argues that contrary to the aims of colonial officials and elites, white settlers, African slaves, and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley each practiced small-scale production and trade that brought each group into contact with the others through what he calls the “frontier exchange,” which ended due to increased immigration and commercial plantation farming after 1763. The first half of the book is a top-down chronology of the Louisiana colony, while the second half is a bottom-up social history detailing the subsistence and trade activities of Natives, settlers, and slaves. Usner makes use of colonial records and court proceedings to draw out examples of small-scale daily trade on the frontier. The Choctaw Nation features prominently in Usner’s book, and his regional perspective contextualizes Choctaw history in a way that more focused works cannot. Unlike White, who emphasized the negative impact of the market economy on the Choctaw, Usner shows that their participation in trade was not wholly negative. By paying equal attention to Euro-Americans, the enslaved, and Natives, Usner fits into a larger trend in colonial historiography by emphasizing the importance of indigenous and enslaved peoples in shaping the colonial frontier.