"In this book, David Murray explores a range of early exchanges between Europeans and Indians, showing how they operated within a set of interlocking economies - linguistic, religious, as well as material.".

"To illustrate the complexities of these cross-cultural transactions, the author looks closely at the work of linguist, trader, and missionary Roger Williams, whose A Key into the Language of America at once serves the purposes of translation, conversion, and trade.

Murray also examines the changing meaning and representation of wampum, the quintessential medium of exchange in the early colonial period, as well as the multiple processes of conversion taking place as Christian ideas were incorporated into Indian cultures."--BOOK JACKET.