Word for "item that can be bought or sold"

Question

I am looking for a single word like "product" but it means that it has monetary value and can be bought, sold, or traded. Specifically I'm trying to write about how Native Americans did not consider land something to be sold until Europeans came. I'd like to say

Native Americans did not consider land to be a _______ (sellable object)

If that's not possible, I could use an antonym instead:

Native Americans considered land to be a ________ (unsellable object)

The words I've thought of, product and commodity, don't quite work. "Product" implies something made, not sellable. "Commodity" connotes an agricultural product or raw material.

Answer 1

I'm no expert and I don't feel entitled to answering a question. But since no one has come up with these words, I propose:

property non-property

What concerns Native Americans about land is whether they own the land they live and use.

So it goes, Native Americans did not consider land to be (a) property.

Like it or not, if it's their idea that land is not synonymous with property, then I think that property can be rightly used in OP's sentence.

Answer 2

Native Americans considered land to be communal.

This language is commonly used when talking about differences between the European settlers and the Native Americans.

Tecumseh is quoted as saying that Indians needed to

...unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now -- for it was never divided, but belongs to all.

By saying this, Tecumseh is laying out a much different understanding of land use than we have now. He sees the land as a communal resource that is to be used by all. He does not see it as Europeans saw it (and as we see it now), as a resource that could and should be owned by individuals who could keep it as their own and exclude others from using it.
_eNotes

Answer 3

If you scratch the indefinite article in your sentence, you could go with merchandise:

the commodities or goods that are bought and sold in business
_{from m-w.com}

Native Americans did not consider land to be merchandise.

Answer 4

Monetize. It is simply defined as 'to earn revenue from'. For clarity 'revenue' would be similar to profits, which colloquially is money. I understand it wouldn't be suitable in regards to the Native Americans but it ticks all boxes and makes sense. Do with what you have.

Answer 5

Fungible

"being something (such as money or a commodity) of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account Oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities." M-W.

Fungible is both adjective and noun. If used as a noun, it would mean something that could not enter into a transaction.

"Native Americans did not consider land to be fungible."

At least one historian has found "fungible land" to be an incisive economic concept. The following is excerpted from a review of Garrett A. Sullivan's, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. vii + 292 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-8047-3303-1. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Theatre%2C+Finance+and+Society+in+Early+Modern+England+%26+The+Drama+of+...-a066123114

"Sullivan's The Drama of Landscape, by contrast, tends more toward a methodology of accretion, mosaic or "bricolage" in which a very wide variety of disparate textual materials, including atlases, estate surveys, ballads and pamphlets, legal documents, and of course plays and poems, are joined into a rich tapestry of social description. The book is divided into three broad sections focusing respectively on estates, on roads, and on the city; and within these sections individual chapters consider one or two early modern plays along with a variety of other materials. While the analysis here remains, as Sullivan concedes, within a broadly "new historicist" tradition of literary analysis, the sheer breadth and unexpectedness of its evidence finally allows the book to transcend the technique of juxtaposition and to reach toward a kind of holistic approach. Sullivan calls on the simultaneous aesthetic and geographic senses of his titular term landscape, using the word as a rubrick for a historical process, at once material and symbolic, in which both literal property relations and the ideological valence of land were drastically transformed. In particular, Sullivan follows the discursive traces of a historical evolution in which what he calls landscapes of "stewardship" or "custom" (in which land is understood as manifesting social relations and moral obligations) were finally transformed into landscapes of "absolute property" (in which land is understood as a fungible economic object, and an object of economic development and profit). Here again, Sullivan's three "landscapes" refer usefully both to the changing forms of land tenure, and to the changing ways in which such changes were seen...."

The concept of land manifesting social relations and moral obligations equally reflects Native American attitudes toward land. They did not see land as "absolute property."