Conclusion: Why Native and Black Revolutionaries Lost the Fight

Abstract

This concluding chapter explores why Native and black revolutionaries lost the fight against hunger. Indians and formerly enslaved people lost the fight against hunger not because they became bad at stopping it but because imperial officials gathered enough information to circumscribe Native Americans' and black colonists' abilities to prevent hunger themselves. Knowledge acquisition gave these white officials a specific kind of power over Native and black revolutionaries: the power to reinterpret histories of hunger. They had received education about Native appetites and how to satisfy and then manipulate those appetites as they implemented a policy of victual imperialism. Government officials who delegitimized Native and black hunger-prevention efforts interfered with other people's food sovereignty. They decided that Indians and formerly enslaved people were unqualified to decide what to grow, sell, cook, and eat, and they made it harder for those communities to feed themselves. Ultimately, their actions ignored centuries of Native hunger prevention and erased a short decade of free black colonists' efforts to act similarly.