Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early ... History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)
Innovative on two counts, this book succeeds both as a narrative that integrates Indians, blacks, and European settlers into a history of Louisiana from French settlement in 1699 until its cession to the Spanish in 1783, and as a detailed examination of the exchange networks that provided subsistence to the peoples of the area and characterized the cultural interchanges among them. Usner (history, Cornell) focuses on food production, transport, and marketing as a way of examining the social relations among Indians, blacks, and French colonists, resulting in new perspectives on slavery, Indian-white relations, and colonial life. He shows how the development of plantation agriculture destroyed the frontier exchange economy, without entirely dismantling the unique society it had created.- David B. Mattern, Univ. of Virginia, CharlottesvilleCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.