Answer:
Labor and Trade in Colonial America
Common Misconceptions
When textbooks discuss colonial labor practices, they most often associate the concept of labor with male work done outside the physical boundaries of the home—in fields; on docks; in warehouses; on ships. Labor is associated with creating goods for market, allowing men to participate in the "triangle trade"—a network of trade relationships in which raw materials flowed from the Americas to Europe, manufactured goods moved from Europe to Africa, and enslaved Africans were shipped back to the Americas. Yet this framing oversimplifies the complex history of labor in colonial America. It overlooks female labor as central, not peripheral, to the survival of familial and colonial economies alike. It ignores the fact that different patterns of labor existed in Native communities, and that non-Native opinions of Native labor practices influenced colonial Indian policy. It also oversimplifies the complex web of international trade relationships that wove together the Atlantic world. Commodities never flowed in one direction; goods, people, and services might depart from, and end their journey at, any number of Atlantic world ports. In the western contemporary world we are used to thinking of work as something done for wages outside the home. This distinction did not hold for the vast majority of laborers in colonial America. Colonial America was overwhelmingly rural, and North or South, households were made up of a dwelling place for a family (which often included servants and slaves), a garden, shelter for livestock, and fields for crops. While it was rarely their primary responsibility, many free women worked in the fields alongside their husbands, fathers, and brothers, as well as the household's male and female indentured servants or slaves. Some of the raw materials produced outside the walls of the family's dwelling place might go to market, but most came back into the home to be turned into clothing or food, or perhaps bartered for services with neighbors.
Native Americans: Encounters and Labor Systems
Many textbooks marginalize the history of American Indian communities in this period, noting their presence only in times of war. Violence did occur; pitched battles were fought over land ownership and in defense of ways of life threatened by European settlers and disease. Yet there were many more neutral encounters between Native and non-Native people than textbooks would have us believe. In those encounters, many non-Native individuals were exposed to different ways of organizing labor—women as farmers, for example, and men who hunted to provide a family's sustenance, rather than for sport (see Primary Source John White, The Indian Village of Secoton [1585-86]).
...misapprehensions about some Native systems of labor organization fed into European settlers' own sense of racial superiority.
These practices frequently baffled Europeans who, armed with a need to defend their tenancy on lands that did not belong to them, often used them as evidence of Indian people's lack of "civilization." It quickly became a trope that Native women were drudges, that men were wasteful, and worse, beggars. These misapprehensions about some Native systems of labor organization fed into European settlers' own sense of racial superiority. It is important to understand that labor was not only about meeting the everyday needs of a family, or supplying a region's long-term economic health. It could also become the means by which people understood or misunderstood each other, and was used by settlers as a justification for land dispossession and violent confrontation.