Daily Inspiration Quote by John Lawson

“Living very conveniently” is doing a lot of quiet ideological work here. Lawson, an English explorer surveying the Carolinas at the turn of the 18th century, drops this line with the breezy tone of someone noting a profitable lifestyle choice. The apparent neutrality is the point: it normalizes a frontier economy built on Indigenous relationships while simultaneously framing those relationships as an “Interest,” a tidy asset class rather than a complex set of nations with political agency.

The “French” in the sentence are less a people than a warning label. In British colonial writing, France often stands in for a rival imperial style: more flexible, more intermarried, more willing to embed inside Native trade networks. Lawson’s phrasing implies admiration with an edge of suspicion. They’re not merely trading; they’re “following a Trade,” almost like a vocation, and doing so in a way that looks enviably sustainable. That envy carries strategic anxiety: if the French can live well by aligning with Indigenous commerce, then English claims based on charters and plantations start to look brittle.

Subtextually, convenience is a moral solvent. It suggests that survival and comfort excuse intimacy with Native economies, even as English colonial projects elsewhere were selling themselves as “civilizing” alternatives. Lawson’s sentence captures an early American reality elites preferred not to foreground: on the ground, power often belonged to whoever could negotiate access, kinship, and credit within Indigenous-controlled corridors. “Conveniently” is a wink at how empire actually functioned - not as maps and proclamations, but as logistics, alliances, and goods moving hand to hand.