Seventeenth Century.

Few settlers lived completely independent of imported goods at any time in the colonial period. Indeed, English settlement followed paths blazed by traders who acquired furs from Native Americans in exchange for European manufactured goods. Early colonists in New England and the Chesapeake tried to sustain this trade by introducing items such as new metal goods, woolen fabrics, and firearms. The new European trade goods rapidly transformed Native American ways of life. Settlers who arrived earlier also relied on a constant influx of later colonists who brought such goods as nails, gunpowder, lead shot, glass, cooking utensils, books, and cloth to trade for food and lumber. Seventeenth-century tobacco planters traded their crops with Dutch and English merchants for various European products while their contemporaries in Massachusetts traded grain and salt pork for West Indian sugar, molasses, and rum. A modest flow...