The History of the Americans #99 Fathoms of Wampum: Trade in New England and New Netherland in the 1620s-30s
This episode is about the trading between the Dutch of New Netherland, the English first of Plymouth and then of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Algonquian and Iroquoian tribes in the region during the 1620s and 1630s. These relationships were important, both to the profitability of settlement for the Dutch and the English, and because they so destabilized the balance of power among the tribes and the Europeans that they would eventually lead to the very ugly Pequot War of 1636-38. The indigenous ceremonial currency, wampum, sat at the center of this trade, and we take a first look at its monetization by the Dutch and then the English.
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Selected references for this episode
Mark Meuwese, “The Dutch Connection: New Netherland, the Pequots, and the Puritans in Southern New England, 1620—1638,” Early American Studies, Spring 2011.
Paul Otto, “Henry Hudson, the Munsees, and the Wampum Revolution,” published in The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. Jaap Jacobs and Lou Roper. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014
D. I. Bushnell, Jr., “The Origin of Wampum,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Jan – Jun 1906.