To Be Men of Business

David Andrew Nichols is a professor of history and Native American and Indigenous studies and Donald Carmony Chair of History at Indiana University. He is the author of, most recently, Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 and Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Empire. He is the editor of Indiana Magazine of History.

"To Be Men of Business is a significant treatment of both culture change and the preservation of Indigenous social and political systems. David Nichols effectively demonstrates how Chickasaw business acumen helped them cope with the trauma of removal. (Who knew that capitalism could be a tool of empowerment in removal?) There are few scholarly studies of the Chickasaws and none that address this topic; Nichols's discussion of the diplomatic economy is a theoretical contribution that has the potential to shape historical categories of analysis in very productive ways."--Katherine M. B. Osburn, author of Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977 "David Nichols delineates the hows and whys of the changing economies, as well as the Chickasaws' involvement in and oftentimes direction of these changes, situating this narrative in the larger context of American history, and particularly American and Native interactions, policies, economics, and power dynamics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nichols, perhaps better than any other historian of the Native South, knows and understands the primary sources for this time and place, and he has put his knowledge of these sources to excellent use in this volume."--Robbie Ethridge, author of From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715