But the English desire for Indian slaves who could be sold to the West Indies spurred the market in human beings, transforming the practice and destabilizing southeastern societies overall. Captured people were now commodities. And, as happened all over the colonies in North America, the Alabama-Coushattas were drawn into European balance-of-power politics among the English, French, and Spanish. We think our society is uniquely complicated today, but it is hard to fathom this world of colliding cultures, languages, religions, differentials of power—with few restraints on how power could be
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