The economic history of North America began thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, as the ancestors of modern Indians dispersed over the continent to nearly every kind of environmental setting and then, over time, elaborated and modified their various ways of life. Although generalizations about this diversity of peoples and their long history are hazardous, certain basic themes run throughout it and into the period of European encounters that followed. One theme is that because Indian communities represented collections of kin groups, both biological and fictional, rather than of individual subjects or citizens, the norms, roles, and obligations attending kinship underscored economic, social, and political life. A second theme is that economic life consisted largely of activities relating to subsistence and to the exchange of gifts. A third theme is that religious beliefs and rituals generally underscored these economic activities.

The arrival of Europeans after A.D. 1500 brought a people whose norms and customs presented a sharp contrast to those of Native Americans. While most Europeans likewise owed allegiance to families and communities, these were frequently superseded by loyalties to more abstract nation-states and institutionalized religions. Moreover, Europeans were elaborating practices of capital accumulation and market production that were utterly foreign to Native Americans. Finally, there was a biological discrepancy between the two peoples. By their exposure to a wide range of Eastern Hemisphere pathogens, Europeans had transformed smallpox and numerous other epidemic disorders into childhood diseases. Native Americans, on the other hand, utterly lacked previous exposure to such diseases and were thus far less effective in resisting them.