"Red Rat and The Maker" argues that southeastern American Indians and British settlers in South Carolina and Georgia used and misused objects and exchange relationships to shape the terms of colonization. The prevailing historiography assumes that pre-contact Native Americans only comprehended gift exchange and would do anything for European manufactures, whereas the British were fluent in asocial commodity exchange and had no need for American Indian manufactures. This dissertation challenges this account, arguing that overlapping beliefs about objects and economic relationships made exchange a fertile area where American Indians and British settlers communicated expectations. Both groups created and distributed specific goods (painted deerskins, food, clothing, weapons) that asked the receiver to absorb and actualize an embodied vision of history, identity, or obligation. Despite the givers' intentions, Native American and British consumers used cross-cultural goods for unintended ends. British colonial officials erased the messages painted on deerskins, presented in food, and shaped in clothing by selling them at public auction or shipping them across the Atlantic; Native Americans consistently "misused" the British guns, flags, medals, and cloth to fashion separate identities.

This dissertation argues that by overemphasizing the asocial rules of commodity exchange historians have failed to recognize that early modern British debates and anxieties about moveable property and commercial expansion shaped cross-cultural trade regulations in the colonial southeast. British officials were nervous that white Indian traders, who mimicked British peddlers in form and function, would manipulate their Native American trading partners to realize the trader's selfish goals. Thus British colonists forced Indian traders to remain sedentary and kept a stranglehold on the most social dimensions of exchange: credit and price negotiations. But in the spaces beyond colonial authority, Indian traders and American Indians ignored, lobbied against, and subverted official policies. Instead of looking at objects and exchange practices as pre-contact constructions that were accepted or rejected, sustained or changed, my dissertation demonstrates that a more accurate understanding of the colonial exchange dynamics requires a shift in focus to include not only the institutions and objects of trade but also the actions individuals and groups employed within and against these frameworks.