Captive Economies: Social Reproduction, Commodification, and Settler Colonialism in the Northeast 1630-1763

Captivity was a ubiquitous part of warfare in the colonial northeast from 1630 to 1763. English colonists and Native polities took captives for cultural, socio-economic, and political purposes. Historians have tended to discuss these two systems of captivity separately, focusing on either Indian captivity (which refers to Euro-American colonists taken captive by Indians) or Native enslavement (which refers to Euro-American capture and enslavement of Native peoples). The source bases contribute to this division as a focus on the captivity narrative literature produced by redeemed Euro-American captives allows for a ready retelling of the white captive experience, while the fragmented archive of Native enslavement complicates historical recovery of the Native captivity experience. This dissertation seeks to bridge this gap by drawing upon records from colonial assemblies, colonial and town legal records, local histories, treaties and treaty minutes, captivity narratives, letters, journals, diaries, early modern engravings, maps, English and Native material culture, and built structures like town animal pounds to put these two types of captivity into conversation. This comparative approach studies the intersection and evolution of these two systems to better understand how they mutually informed and transformed each other, leading to the development of multiple captive trade systems that circulated captives throughout New England, into French Canada, and into the Atlantic world. This dissertation telescopes between the macro and the micro to understand how English, French, and Native polities deployed different regimes of value to captive bodies to send or sell Native or English colonists into captivity. In the seventeenth century, English colonists and their Native allies increasingly competed over Native captives as an extension of quests for sovereignty and geo-political power. By King Philip’s War, English colonists used a process of human commodification to turn captive Natives into slaves, adding a layer of fungibility to already valuable captives. Native peoples responded in various ways: some adopted English habits of mind and added more economic import to already valuable bodies while others took English colonists captive to use for labor or as leverage for diplomacy. Regardless of which regime of value they applied to captives, English and Native captors both viewed them as vital for the social reproduction of their respective societies, making captive women in particular central to the captivity complex because of the valuable labor they performed. The captive trade systems that developed had a lop-sided effect, however, as English captive taking decimated Native populations in the service of claiming Native lands to plant and Native bodies to labor. By the eighteenth century, as the French made their presence known in the northeast, Native Americans would extend their captive taking to include more English colonists as part of power diplomacy. Native peoples who found their political economies devastated by imperial warfare, loss of land, demographic catastrophes, and fluctuations in the Atlantic trade economy viewed English colonists as a commodity to sell the French to sustain their families and communities. By working at the intersection of captivity, settler colonialism, human commodification, gender, and social reproduction, this dissertation complicates current understandings of the processes of English colonization and Native perseverance, Native dispossession and enslavement, and the evolution of human fungibility in one corner of the Atlantic world.