To tell the story of the Americas as the violent “pacifying” and corralling of free indigenous peoples by white outsiders is to erase the long history of statism in many places. The story of European colonization of the Americas is popularly understood as the conquest of American Indians—the end of natives’ control of the land and the beginning of their subjugation.
The contingencies of indigenous agency and geopolitics mean that the reality is much messier, as historians have been steadily revealing for decades, but this interpretation still circulates.
One possible reason for its longevity is the still common impression that Indians all roamed freely over the land, lacking a conception of private property and existing in a state of virtual harmony when the first agents of European states made contact in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. A necessary corollary to this image of precontact native freedom is the implication that these societies had no state or barely had one to speak of and that the suffocating stays of political power were as novel to them as the diseases the strangers carried with them.
Certainly, many indigenous societies were self-governing—consensual chiefdoms in which leaders were unable to use force or to act without consulting their entire community. The chiefdoms of Hudson Valley societies such as the Mahicans (a.k.a. Mohicans) are a case in point. In these kinds of societies dissatisfied tribesmen could even desert a chief without fear of retribution. Other groups such as Inuit lacked chiefs entirely, though talented hunters’ and elders’ opinions held special weight when community members made decisions.
But it must not be forgotten that large centralized polities also existed in the Americas prior to European contact. These had the basic trappings of a state: a centralized authority’s superimposition of property claims (and accompanying authority) over the existing property rights of others through force and intimidation, and exploitative economic relations in which this self-proclaimed authority extracts wealth from others by force or intimidation rather than voluntary exchange.
For example, the Powhatan chiefdom of the Chesapeake consisted of a paramount chief (the mamanatowick), the chiefs (werowances, or “commanders”) of subject tribes under him, the werowances of satellite towns, and commoners. Unsurprisingly, the mamanatowick and the werowances (who all could be male or female) alike inherited their offices and had a symbiotic relationship with the influential clerical class, who were consulted in matters of foreign policy and crime.1
Powhatan, who was the mamanatowick in the days of Jamestown, inherited the paramount chieftaincy and six chiefdoms (Powhatan, Arrohateck, Appamattuck, Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and Chiskiack) from his parents between the 1550s and 1580s. He then expanded his rule: he conquered the Kecoughtans (he had his goons kill their chief), exterminated the Chesapeakes (had his goons massacre most of the people, who would not submit), and by 1607, when John Smith made landfall in the name of the English state, had subjugated all the peoples of the Chesapeake coastal plain except for the Chickahominies.2
Tribute payments of food and other valuables went up the hierarchy, extracted by both the mamanatowick and the werowances. The only exception was copper, which Powhatan monopolized and used to pay his werowances for their military services—that is, for them to kill others, stare down those who remained, and thereby keep the great chief in power. He also made gifts of copper to others, buying support and perhaps submission.3
The tribute payments were involuntary—there is even record of people hiding food in underground storage pits in addition to the aboveground buildings specifically designated as storehouses, possibly to keep more of their wealth. As contemporaneous observer William Strachey noted:
Their corn and (indeed) their copper, hatchetts, howses, beades, perle and most things with them of value, according to their own estymacion, they hide, one from the knowledge of another, in the grownd within the woods, and so keepe them all the yeare, or untill they have fitt use for them … and when they take them forth, they scarse make their women privie to the storehowse.4
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