Chains of consumption: The Iroquois and consumer goods, 1550--1800.

摘要

This dissertation is a cultural history of Iroquoian consumption of goods manufactured outside of Iroquoia. Rejecting the standard models of the fur trade and of dependency, I approach the changes in Iroquoian material and immaterial culture through the lenses of consumption, the body, and materiality. I argue that encouraging Native American consumption of British goods, especially woolens, was an important component of the first British empire from 1550 through the American Revolution. Early colonial promoters like the Hakluyts imagined a continent filled with "naked Indians" who would eagerly wear British cloth and alleviate glutted woolen markets. The Iroquois were not passive receivers of European-made things---they adopted the world of goods according to their own ends, invested goods with their own cultural meanings, and integrated them into their bodies in ways unforeseen and uncontrolled by Europeans. The Iroquoian ideal of beauty was particularly critical, for it undergirded their cosmogony and basic understandings of goodness, truth, and power. The new world of goods altered the basic materiality of Iroquoian existence, but distinctly Iroquoian patterns of materiality persisted throughout these changes. The goods arrived at the same time that epidemic disease destroyed populations, disfigured their bodies, and caused massive, widespread mourning wars. The new goods were a critical means of coping with these severe traumas, particularly in the realm of relations between peoples. The materiality of these relationships was given new and enduring forms in diplomatic gift exchange, creating the chains of consumption that bound Europeans and Iroquoians together. Gifts from British patrons to Iroquois leaders transformed Iroquoian leadership and ideas about property, and eventually hybrid forms of leadership emerged that combined British and Iroquoian leadership styles. This hybrid leadership---embodied by figures like Corlaer, William Johnson, Hendrick, Shickellamy, and Joseph Brant---relied heavily on the new world of goods and the chains of consumption to sustain itself. These chains were strong enough to force the Lenapes off their lands, without a war of conquest, for the Iroquois metaphorically emasculated them and forced them to "wear petticoats." Native groups ostensibly subservient to the Iroquois-British chains of consumption rebelled during the Seven Years' War ant Pontiac's War, throwing off their petticoats and rejecting consumer goods. With the conquest of Iroquoian homelands by the Americans during the Revolution, the gift economy that had sustained Iroquoians and their chains of consumption collapsed.