ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the extent to which the eighteenth-century southeastern Indian economy was a market economy. Yet as valuable as the southeastern Indian trade in hides was, it was eclipsed by the rival agricultural interests in Virginia and the Carolinas. The southeastern Indian population was approximately 54,000 and they exported 187,250 pounds sterling worth of deerskins just through Charleston. The volume of the Native American trade for deerskins can be measured from the South Carolina tax records because hides were taxed by weight when exported. British traders and the taxes they paid both helped and hurt Indian-colonial relations. Although the volume of the Indian trade was high and the colonials were willing to expend resources to participate in it, it might still have been a subsistence economy on a per person level. The traditional explanation of Indian demise says that Indians lost sovereignty to their land because their subsistence economy came into conflict with a capitalist one.
