How much were the trade beads the English gave to the Native Americans worth in England?

by paxinfernum

Nowadays, we hear about someone trading an entire island for beads, which sounds like a ridiculous lowball offer. So were the beads as cheap back then for the English to make as they would be for us now?

legrandcastor

In short, not very much.

If you go read sleeper smith's "rethinking the fur trade" or Ann Smart-martin's "buying into a world of goods," both establish that early modern Europe is capable of churning out large quantities of low cost consumer items through production at scale. In the case of beads, Venice was known at that time to churn out insane numbers of relatively inexpensive glass beads, many of which found their way into fur trade stores.

For further perspective on the value of beads, according to one document in 1740 from the Hudson Bay company, their trading post at York Factory would exchange one "made beaver" (IE one beaver pelt that had been fleshed and tanned or preserved) for 2 pounds of glass beads. That's a lot of beads when you consider how little an individual bead weighs. They'd exchange a gun for 14 made beavers, 4 knives for one made beaver, a hatchet for 1 made beaver, and a yard of English wool broadcloth (good quality) for 3.5 made beavers.

While a few really lopsided cases like the Manhattan trade do exist, generally native nations are incredibly discerning buyers who know when someone is trying to screw them over, and will avoid trade with them or physically punish them for the attempted hoodwinking. This is especially true after the initial contact period, which all my sources postdate.