Indigenous and African intellectual labor and the commodities of vast early America

• Draper, Mary ^[1]
  1. [1] Midwestern State University of Texas
• Localización: Esboços: histórias em contextos globais, ISSN-e 2175-7976, Vol. 28, Nº. 49, 2021, págs. 716-727
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article calls for centering the lives, labor, and expertise of Indigenous, African, and African-descended people in future commodity histories of the colonial Americas. The production of the Atlantic world’s most prized commodities depended upon the expertise and intellectual labor of Indigenous and African people. Their knowledge — which was often violently extracted by Europeans through enslavement — buttressed colonization and enabled the existence of many of the early modern Atlantic world’s commodities. If we recognize this botanical, agricultural, and environmental knowledge as intellectual history, then historians can show how Indigenous and African knowledge anchored the Atlantic world and, by extension, the global economy. At the same time, though, the creation of these commodities resulted in environmental devastation. Though imperial wealth depended upon their labor, Indigenous and African people bore the brunt of environmental collapse in the wake of commodity production. Their livelihoods and homelands were not protected.