Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

Chapter 2 opens with a description of a souvenir shop selling knock-off native goods. This shop is located in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where its owner, the Hudson’s Bay Company, dominated the fur trade in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

The fur trade, like the silver trade, relied on exploitation of Indian labor and resources. In the 1800s the Hudson’s Bay Company subsumed smaller fur-trading companies to become the dominant force (22-23). Beaver pelts were in high demand in Europe, both for their useful properties (waterproof, held shape well) and because the Europeans had hunted the pelt-bearing animals of their continent to near extinction (25).

The insatiable demand for pelts led to the development of corporate structures. While history has lionized the early fur traders as rugged, independent, and pioneering individuals, Weatherford argues that as employees of the “the first modern corporation” (22), they were in fact well organized, standardized, and regulated to a T. At Fort William the Hudson’s Bay Company exploited the labor of both the Indians and its own European workers, often withholding wages and forcing company men to renew their contracts by violence (26). These labor techniques would be critical to “the development of industrial society and the modern factory in the nineteenth century” (26).

The European hunger for precious metals also drove piracy. English pirates like Frances Drake extracted huge amounts of Spanish silver from the Pacific Coast of South America. Weatherford underlines the unsavory nature of these transactions: Drake partnered with a slave trader, John Hawkins, to form one of the earliest British companies. Others would follow it: the Massachusetts Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Virginia Company. Weatherford argues, “The goal of these companies was to go into the New World and extract something for trade and profit” (31). Prioritizing profit over the Spanish concern for converting the Indians to Christianity, the British colonies slowly spread their capitalistic trade network throughout North America (34).

When the Americans booted these companies out after the American Revolution, they took advantage of political and civic unrest in South America to take up roots there, revitalizing the long-dead silver mines of Potosí in 1825 (36). Private European companies from various nations would go on to enforce colonial policies through such endeavors into the modern day. 

The Americas provided the quantity of raw goods and the need to innovate labor techniques and technologies that enabled the Industrial Revolution.

Weatherford opens with a description of the German village of Kahl, where life largely remained the same for hundreds of years before undergoing sudden, cataclysmic change in the last few centuries. This change was driven by industrialization. Weatherford asks, “What happened to the world in the 1700s and 1800s to make it industrialize after thousands of static years of technological stability?” (41). In short, the Old World made contact with the New.

High-quality cotton grew abundantly in the Americas and quickly replaced wool as the fabric of choice (41). While wool supply had been limited by the number of sheep, cotton had no such restrictions, and a more efficient means of manufacturing cloth was necessary. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, transforming the textiles industry and igniting the industrial revolution (43-44). Indians also developed superior dyes in many more shades than were available in the Old World, which the Europeans quickly embraced (44-46).

Sisal and rubber, other New World materials discovered by the Indians, were crucial components of technological innovation. While the Indians had long been using and vulcanizing rubber for various purposes, Europeans did not “discover” its utility until the 19th century, when Charles Goodyear independently developed the vulcanization process. Rubber’s durable, waterproof properties made possible Arctic, jungle, and even desert exploration, as well as the fabrication of innumerable machine parts (46-47).

With this new influx of new raw materials to process—cotton, rubber, tar, asphalt, and countless others—Old World manufacturing techniques were no longer sufficient. A shortage of labor to meet production demand drove new labor techniques: first, African and Indian slavery, and second, the factory system (49-53). Labor techniques developed in America were adopted in the Old World as well, where they quickly came in conflict with traditional craft production. Russian activist Peter Kropotkin “recognized in the emerging factories a condition closer to slavery than to the craft heritage” (55).

Weatherford returns to Kahl to bookend his argument: Kahl’s industrialization represents in microcosm a process that occurred throughout Europe, an industrial revolution spurred in no small part by developments in the Americas (57).