A Case of Non-commodified and Indirect Economic Imperialism
It would simplify matters if we could conclude that all systems of stateless foragers were like the one in northern California, lacking a core/periphery hierarchy. But the Pacific Northwest featured a large, hierarchical system in which the core polities had enough economic power to motivate the peripheral polities to employ warfare against one another.
Within the coastal polities (Haida, Kwatkiutl, Tlingit, etc.), hereditary “big men” maintained their status and power in a system of competitive feasting and gift-giving known as the potlach. These maritime polities were hunter-gatherers with access to valuable coastal food resources (marine mammals, fish, and shellfish): they had enough economic power to extract war captives from peripheral polities. The peripheral polities raided one another and sold captives in exchange for food and other valuables. The coastal polities had ranked lineages,slaves, and a very strong ideology of superior birth. Between 5 and 25 percent of the population of the coastal polities were slaves.[270] This was an unusual kind of core/ periphery hierarchy.
This development differs not only from the world-system of indigenous northern California, but moreover it differs from the model of core-polity armies conquering and exploiting non-core peoples that we know so well from historical sources. The Pacific Northwest shows the existence of economic imperialism in the absence of pronounced commodification. A proto-money (dentalium shells) was used as medium of exchange. But most exchange took the form of reciprocal gift-giving carried out by village heads. This down-the-line trade relocated war captives from distant slave raiders to the maritime core polities.[271] Slaves and their children in the core polities often became integrated into the local kinship system by marriage and adoption; so this was a very different kind of system from the better-known chattel slavery that emerged in more commodified and more hierarchical polities.[272]
This differential shows that core/periphery hierarchy (exploitation and domination) can exist even among polities that are not in direct contact with one another, and in a situation in which the core does not use coercion on the non-core to extract resources. A core-periphery hierarchy can operate without any direct coercion exerted by core polities if these have a resource that is in great demand.
In this situation peripheral polities will be motivated to coerce one another in order to be able to obtain valuables from the core. This is an unusual case, in which core polities, lacking ability to project military power, still were able to extract resources from non-core polities, and in which economic power was exerted in the absence of commodified relations. All the polities in the Pacific Northwest were integrated by kin-based sharing and reciprocity. Interpolity relations consisted of raiding, line wars, and gift exchanges among polity heads. Dentalium shells were a symbol of value that facilitated reciprocal gift-giving among polity heads in this large regional network, but they were not really money (a generalized medium of exchange). This was a system in which something like economic imperialism existed, but in the absence of commodified exchange or the projection of force to extract tribute. It was the high value of trade items that motivated peripheral polities to use force on one another.