Book Review Of Lower Mississippi Valley By Daniel Henry Usner

The author Daniel Henry Usner Jr brings the lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 into focus and delivers a coherent story of the complex social and economic history that is entangled into the Lower Mississippi Valley region. Usner reveals in this monograph the daily interactions between Europeans, Africans, and Indians in early colonial America. The study concentrates on the region along the Gulf Coast and depicts the frequent changes of political power beginning with the occupation of the French from 1699 to the early 1760s, and then the divided occupation of the Gulf Coast between the Spanish and the British from the early 1760s until the early 1780s. Usner does a notable job of exploiting the active participation in the local and regional

The first division is a chronological account of the volatile political and diplomatic shifts of control and identity. In the first four chapters the evolution of the Lower Mississippi valley is meticulously examined. The initial establishment of France at Biloxi Bay in 1699 and the economic interest they had with the native Indians proved to have devastating impacts on the region. The undesirable conduct of the Indians motivated the Europeans colonist to export the Indians to the Caribbean in exchange for African slaves which would lead to a sequence of colonial wars and constant conflict with the Indians. Also covered in this section is the lack of imperial interest and the insufficient profit which facilitated the self-sufficient regional level “frontier exchange economy.” Concluding the chronology of the evolution of the Lower Mississippi Valley is the transformation that the Treaty of Paris resulted in as it realigned the political control from France to both Spain and Great Britain. Both Spain and Great Britain aggressively conscripted colonist, expanded and proliferated staple crop plantations, and expanded commercialized trade. Along with the increase in staple crop plantation was an increase in population, specifically African

Indians, blacks, and white Europeans enjoyed significant freedom and autonomy throughout the French occupation of the Gulf region. However, the division of the region between the Spanish and Great Britain greatly altered these cross-culture and interracial interactions and created the beginning of a plantation agriculture economy. He argues that export-directed economy supplanted the frontier exchange economy which negatively changed the social contract between Indians, blacks, and European settlers. The transition from small producers to a full-scale commercialized economy enforced by planters, merchants, and colonial authorities through military use and the law ultimately eliminated the economic autonomy of the regions non-elite; Indians, blacks, and European settlers. The effects of these new economic and social developments consequently restricted blacks to plantation labor, small-scale land owners suffered from the inability to compete with large-scale plantations, and Indians underwent high restrictions and regulated trades with Spain and Great Britain for deer