Alice Littlefield

Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives presents historical evidence that wage labor was prevalent among Native Americans.In this timely collection of essays, leading ethnographers and ethnohistorians, as well as innovative younger scholars, present field and primary historical evidence that wage labor was a significant American Indian economic adaptation as early as the seventeenth century in some areas and was common in many U.S. indigenous communities by the late nineteenth century.These well-written, well-documented case studies form a concrete picture of Indian dependence on wage labor from Maine to California and of Native Americans' place in the capitalist system.

The best of current thinking in Marxist anthropology on the inter-relationships of economies, polities, and kinship systems is encompassed in these eleven papers by fourteen authors. Chapter I, Petty Production, targets petty producers in diverse political-economic contexts ranging from the linen industry in eighteenth-century Northern Ireland to entrepreneurship in contemporary China. Chapter II, Kinship in Political Economy, analyzes the consequences of production sysems for social organization and social reproduction among Languedoc viticulturalists, Bolivian Aymara, and the Cheyenne. Their work encourages us to rethink the complex interdependence of kinship and political economy. Chapter III, the State as Economic Actor, examines the role of state power as arbiter of investment, surplus flows, and labor markets, analyzing the impact of state policy on the economic fate of particular populations-Peruvian and Portuguese peasants, Tongans, indigenous peoples in the United States-in the context of larger political economic systems. Contributors include Hill Gates, Marilyn Cohen, Leigh Binford, Scott Cook, Jane L. Collins, Winnie Lem, Alice B. Kehoe, John H. Moore, David Nugent, Timothy J. Finan, Roger W. Fix, Mark L. Langworthy, Christine Ward Gailey, and Alice Littlefield. Co-published with the Society for Economic Anthropology.