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The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. By Alan Gallay. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii, 444. Preface, acknowledgments, note on text and terminology, introduction, map, afterword, notes, index. $35.00, cloth; $18.00, paper.)
Alan Gallay provides the first detailed examination of the Indian slave trade in the colonial American South. The trade developed from indigenous slaving practices after European settlers arrived and demanded inexpensive labor. Gallay carefully reconstructs the shifting web of alliances and hostilities that characterized the slave trade and examines its impacts on colonial European as well as southeastern Indian communities.
Gallay focuses on England's South Carolina colony from its settlement in 1670 until the aftermath of the 1715 Yamassee war, yet he ranges widely in examining the trade's entanglements. The central thesis is that the Indian slave trade dominated economic relations between English, French, and Spanish colonies and the region's many indigenous groups. For Gallay, the region's single most prized economic resource was human labor, the control of which profoundly affected other social, cultural, and political institutions.
The book begins with a review of Indian slavery during pre-contact times, when it was, for the most part, a social institution for assimilating...