Colonial Commerce

Colonial Commerce explores the ways men and women, whites, blacks, and Indians and merchants, traders, laborers and planters interacted together in the Albemarle region of North Carolina. Analysis of colonial documents, such as county court records, debt receipts and merchant accounts along with political letters reveals a vigorous local economy in early colonial North Carolina that transcended race, class and gender. Local markets supported a lucrative transatlantic trade in skins and "goods and wares." Local trade brought blacks, whites, and Indians and men and women of different classes into numerous economic relationships with one another. Such contact fostered cycles of cooperation and conflict reflected in North Carolina's unstable political history and complicates our understanding of divisions in race, class and gender in the local economy of early colonial America.