Hunger, Accommodation, and Violence in Colonial America

Abstract

This chapter examines how, between the 1500s and 1700s, two varying approaches toward dealing with food and hunger allowed inconsistent ideas about hunger to form, which in turn influenced how Natives and non-Natives exchanged food and destroyed it. From the decades after the arrival of Columbus to the mid-eighteenth century, food functioned together with the alcohol, furs, trade goods, and wampum that Indians and Europeans imbued with practical and symbolic meanings. These cross-cultural dealings ensured the existence of a type of Native and non-Native diplomacy called forest diplomacy—and thus of peace. Food sharing, like other practices, could work within the framework of a commodity-exchange economy and a gift-exchange economy. The overlap between these two economies permitted creative misunderstandings and cooperation, while also fostering conflict. Cooperative food exchange was paralleled by battles over commodities, including the destruction of crops and attacks against domesticated animals. Europeans employed victual warfare against other Europeans during military conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in North America, Indian warriors, soldiers, and colonial civilians practiced victual warfare. Meanwhile, mainland colonists did not practice victual warfare against enslaved Africans because they did not need to; they simply controlled access to food. Slaveholders ensured that bondpeople went hungry by restricting consumption and limiting their abilities to use land to grow garden produce.