This course will explore relationships between Indigenous peoples, empire, and capitalism since the late fifteenth century. It will focus on questions of the embeddedness of economies in a wide variety of both Indigenous and imperial societies and cultures while paying particular attention to critiques of both empire and economic systems, whether feudalism, gift or other indigenous economies, or capitalism. The course will also explore the imperialism of the discipline of economics, its scientific discourse of universal laws, and the ways in which these have driven the expansion of the market system, influenced recipes for "improving" Indigenous society, and continue to profoundly shape historical analysis.