Capitalism during the American colonial era was an economic system known primarily for dispossessing and exploiting Indigenous peoples. Some Indigenous nations, however, learned to use its primary features--wealth accumulation, private investment, and a globalized marketplace--to strengthen their families and defend their communities. The Chickasaws of the American Southeast exemplified these Indigenous capitalists. To Be Men of Business examines the Chickasaw Nation's education in business and commerce, adaptation to a capitalist economy, and survival by maneuvering in the market economy established by settlers in North America. The Chickasaw Nation, initially a subsistence-oriented society, first entered the Atlantic market economy in the late 1600s through the Native American slave trade, when Chickasaw men's participation in slave raiding brought significant material gains and introduced their families to European goods. Over the course of two hundred years, Chickasaw families adopted aspects of capitalist culture while retaining elements of their own foundational culture norms. The Chickasaw Nation's economic history provides a case study of how a noncapitalist society integrated itself into an increasingly capitalist atmosphere. Amid this economic shift, Chickasaw leaders worked to protect their people from predatory white traders and officials by sending their children to mission schools for English literacy and resisting efforts by the U.S government to gain land cessions from the Chickasaw people. Business and commerce literacy also allowed the Chickasaw Nation some control over their forced migration, and the protective economic institutions Chickasaw leaders established became the basis for a revived Chickasaw national identity following removal from their homeland.
David Andrew Nichols is a professor of history and Native American and Indigenous studies and Donald Carmony Chair of History at Indiana University. He is the author of, most recently, Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 and Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Empire. He is the editor of Indiana Magazine of History.
"To Be Men of Business is a significant treatment of both culture change and the preservation of Indigenous social and political systems. David Nichols effectively demonstrates how Chickasaw business acumen helped them cope with the trauma of removal. (Who knew that capitalism could be a tool of empowerment in removal?) There are few scholarly studies of the Chickasaws and none that address this topic; Nichols's discussion of the diplomatic economy is a theoretical contribution that has the potential to shape historical categories of analysis in very productive ways."--Katherine M. B. Osburn, author of Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977 "David Nichols delineates the hows and whys of the changing economies, as well as the Chickasaws' involvement in and oftentimes direction of these changes, situating this narrative in the larger context of American history, and particularly American and Native interactions, policies, economics, and power dynamics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nichols, perhaps better than any other historian of the Native South, knows and understands the primary sources for this time and place, and he has put his knowledge of these sources to excellent use in this volume."--Robbie Ethridge, author of From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715
