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Published by EH.NET (August 2002) Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiii + 484 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8078-2569-7; $22.50 (paper), ISBN: 0-8078-4882-4. Reviewed for EH.NET by Winifred B. Rothenberg, Department of Economics, Tufts University. “Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”1 Marx’s famous dictum might well serve as the epigraph for Allan Kulikoff’s study of small (white, incidentally) farmers “in the context of ” the capitalist transformation. Kulikoff, Baldwin Professor of Humanities at the University of Georgia, is a prodigiously well-informed scholar of early American history whose research over the last two decades has been devoted to understanding the yeoman farmer in early America. Small farmers, it turns out, left so large and deep a footprint on the American historical landscape, and one that Kulikoff is able to describe at such an astonishing level of detail, that he has had to divide this, his capstone work, into two volumes. The first, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, covers those aspects of the story that one would call broadly ‘economic.’ Although there is nothing on colonial fiscal or monetary policy and little on foreign trade, he deals well with the English background of colonial settlement, the process of emigration, the acquisition and allocation of land, agricultural developments, internal migrations, encounters with Indians, and “the relation [that] farm families forged with the market”(p. 4). The companion volume, The Making of the American Yeoman Class (forthcoming), will deal more intensively, he writes, with questions of class identity, kinship, community, ethnicity, and faith that have long been identified with this author. Kulikoff calls this book a “master narrative,” by which I understand him to mean a narrative around which he has braided a commanding interdisciplinary synthesis that draws from more than 2,000 works from the many proliferating sub-fields into which history as an academic discipline has splintered since the Sixties: women’s history, family history, African-American, Native American, rural, environmental, social, demographic, religious, economic, a bit of political, and enough of contemporary English, Dutch, German, Irish and Scottish history to understand their emigrations to the American colonies.2 Kulikoff begins his history with the Black Death and the depopulation of England that was its consequence. Here, although dense with absorbing detail, the broad outline of his argument is a familiar one: much of the surviving peasantry was loosed from the manor lands and wandered into an emerging labor market. Two centuries later, in the course of the enclosure process, “agrarian capitalists” threw peasants off the lands they had enjoyed for centuries in secure tenure, “leaving them and their descendants with a great yearning for land”(p. 2). In Kulikoff’s telling it was the yearning for land — not for a New Jerusalem or new markets or empires or geopolitics or trade routes or raw materials, but for land — that drove the settlement of England’s North American colonies. In what sense should American history begin in 1348? To ask that question is to ask another: what interpretive theme is threading its way through this story? I can think of three. It can be read as a long-running dialectic between individualism and communalism. Or as a declension narrative: from communities (to which Kulikoff attaches a positive valence) to markets. Or as a redemption narrative: “the same men who evicted peasants financed colonial ventures that promised land to former peasants” two-thirds of whom, and their descendants, became landowners in a new Eden. The three interpretations have this in common: that capitalism is central to all. It motivated the expulsion; it financed the colonization; it secured the property rights by which peasants came to hold land in fee-simple tenure. Looked at in any way, says Kulikoff, “Capitalist transformation, stands at the center of our story” (p. 2). Once capitalism is made to stand at the center it cannot be ignored, although — as always — it immediately causes trouble. In the first place, capitalism — which is here defined as “a society dominated by two classes: capitalists who own the means of production (banks, factories, tools, and productive land) and workers who have only their labor to sell” — did not reach our shores, says Kulikoff on page 2, until after the American Revolution. That is, until after the book ends! In his 1992 book he had gone even further: he argued there that even after the Revolution, ‘capitalism’ (so defined) ill serves to describe an economy of yeomen farmers who themselves owned the means of production with which they produced a surplus as well as their labor to sell.3 Hence the question, how then can capitalism stand at the center of our story? Kulikoff replies, “Because Britain had turned capitalist, colonists swam in a capitalist sea” (p. 2). I find that to be a fascinating and provocative answer, for it implies — does it not? — that capitalism is not embedded in a particular material substratum or set of productive relations; it is not even rooted in the forging of class identities. It is rather a set of behaviors, responses, incentives, a culture that is learned in the act of ‘swimming’ in it; a meme, perhaps, carried to these alien shores by the swimmers.4 If that is so, what happened? Did they shake it off, like a dog, when they reached the shore? As I said, ‘capitalism’ only causes trouble. One would also like to engage Kulikoff in a discussion around the origin of private property rights. I refer to these two statements: “enclosers created private property” (p. 17); and “private property in land (with the absolute right of alienation that went with it) was new in seventeenth-century England” (p. 71). J. H. Baker, in his authoritative Introduction to English Legal History, explains that a distinction was indeed made in Grenvill’s court (1290) between the alienability of an acquisition and of a patrimony: “What [a man] had himself purchased he could alienate without restriction; but what he had inherited he could only alienate in exceptional circumstances.” But within a generation that restriction had been abandoned. In Bracton’s time: “If land were granted to A and his heirs, A received an inheritable fee which he could alienate in its entirety to B and B’s heirs…[I]f the ancestor alienated in fee during his lifetime, the heir had nothing to inherit and no legal standing. The reason given was that the identity of the heir could not be known until the ancestor’s death. Heirs were made by God not man: solus Deus facit haeredem. No ascertained individual was therefore cut off by an alienation inter vivos; an heir apparent or presumptive had an expectation of inheriting, but not a vested estate. The tenant who was granted land ‘to himself and his heirs for ever’ thus had something quite different from a life estate. His estate was of infinite duration and during his lifetime he could alienate it forever.” That the privacy of property has its origins in the early fourteenth century, not the seventeenth, is of immense importance, for it exposes to scrutiny the association — so often assumed — between capitalism and the emergence of libertarian institutions. But lest I be carried far beyond my competence I return now to Kulikoff’s book, a skeleton outline of which he renders as follows: A Prologue “examin[es] how English peasants organized their households; how rich Englishmen got capital to finance colonies; and how others lost their land, tramped the countryside, and became eager to emigrate. Chapter 1 details immigrant recruitment in seventeenth century England and patterns of migration to the colonies. Once they arrived, Chapter 2 shows, colonists faced hostile Indians, deep forests, and a climate far more extreme than England’s. Despite the struggle with Indians, most families did get land and made it their own. As Chapter 3 relates, during the eighteenth century, after coastal lands filled with settlers, colonists moved to new frontiers, chasing Indians away and improving more land. Chapter 4 shows who left eighteenth century Britain and Europe and explains why so many peasants moved east rather than west. Turning from economic and demographic issues to the process of farm making, Chapter 5 describes the gender division of labor on the farm, exchange between farm families, and the relation between market and household. The American Revolution, the epilogue argues, temporarily stopped migration, ended international trade, thrust families into subsistence production, and ignited vicious partisan and Indian warfare; after the war internal migration and farm making resumed and intensified” (p. 4). This outline does not begin to capture the scale and scope, the density and complexity of the synthesis he has achieved. His two chapters on medieval and early modern English rural history do a superb job of fixing the Great Migration in its historical context. One is grateful for the close attention he gives to financing the emigration process by means of subsidies, monopolies, joint stock companies, chartered companies, and trading companies, and for the penetrating detail he brings to his discussion of the settlement process. Particularly noteworthy is his treatment of the colonists’ encounters with Indians. Not having been familiar with these materials, I was struck — as I have been by Peter Mancall’s work — at the amount of information Native Americans appear to have left in the historical record. Tribe by tribe Kulikoff tracks the systematic degradation of Indians from King Philip’s war to their ‘domestication’ through conversion, dispossession, absorption into the labor force, indebtedness, servitude, and enslavement to other Indian tribes. But most impressive is Kulikoff’s ability to write with equal authority about every one of the thirteen colonies. In this field, expertise on one town has sufficed to build an academic career on. To command, at this level of detail, an intimate familiarity with the literatures on every colony is really rather extraordinary. And he remains, as he has always been, acutely sensitive to the roles women have played in sustaining the worlds that British peasants and American farmers made. But it is precisely with respect to “level of detail” that this review pivots from an encomium to a critique. Let me start with a few of his paragraphs for purely illustrative purposes. 1. “All but 4 of the first 238 inhabitants of Salem, Massachusetts got land, and later arrivals fared nearly as well, eleven-twelfths (134 out of 146) getting land. New England land continued to be widely distributed. In three towns in Essex County, Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century, half the men owned land before they were 30, as did 95 percent of men over 36. Before 1660, two-fifths of Connecticut settlers, most of them young men, had no land, but by the 1690s six-sevenths of all farmers owned land. Similarly high levels of landownership could be found in the Chesapeake colonies. In 1660 four-fifths of the white men in Charles County, Maryland were landowners; as the opportunity for former servants to get land plummeted, the proportion of owners among taxable men declined to seven-tenths in 1675 and six-tenths in 1690. Most landless men either moved from the county or died young, before they could acquire land. In both 1687 and 1704 nearly two-thirds of the household heads in Surry County, Virginia held land, as did three-quarters of householders in Talbot County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in 1704. Landownership, moreover, might have been nearly universal in early Pennsylvania; during the 1690s eight-ninths of the householders in one Chester County township owned land” (p. 113) 2. “Six-sevenths of Connecticut men held land, and nine-tenths of those between ages 40 and 70 farmed their own acreage. … [N]early eight-ninths of the [New Hampshire] householders owned land. But in the ports of Portsmouth and Newcastle only two-thirds of the householders owned land; most held just enough for a house lot and small garden. During the Revolutionary era two-thirds of taxed men in East New Jersey owned land, but four-fifths of men over age 27 — nearly all the household heads — did” (p. 131). 3. “The proportion of cottagers and wage laborers among household heads grew from one-quarter before 1560 to two-fifths by 1620, and at the same time the proportion of small-holding husbandmen dropped from about two-fifths to less than one-third. During the 1650s only half of the men in three Lancashire villages worked in agriculture, while two-fifths worked in the textile industry. By 1688 only a quarter of rural families … leased or owned land. Half were cottagers, landless farm laborers, or vagrants, and one-seventh worked exclusively in textiles, mining, and other village industries. At least a third of late-seventeenth-century rural families lacked even a cottager’s garden …” (p. 22). And on and on. Most of this could have been put in tables, charts, graphs, and figures without which it is impossible to make sense of the numbing superfluity of fractions, the numbing superfluity of ‘fact-lets.’ I put the blame for this on the editor, and chalk it up to a serious failure on the Press’s part to identify the book’s target audience. To what readership is it aimed? For the lay or undergraduate reader the forest is all too often obscured by the trees, while graduate students and professionals will be excessively irritated by the absence of even the most elementary processing of quantitative information: percents are as scarce as hens’ teeth. I am reminded of the recent review of a biography of Marcel Proust: “Every conceivable fact about Proust and about Proust’s friends and friends of his friends, and about what they wrote, read, saw, heard, and loved is literally stuffed into the Life, usually in very short segments that are, despite the author’s desire to suggest otherwise, a hasty collage of disconnected scenes et portraits … Tadie’s insights are almost always surrounded by innumerable facts that end up clouding a sustained meditation on the inner Proust. Tadie machine-guns facts with vertiginous dispatch, for he not only knows everything there is to know about Proust — but he also means us to know it.”6 In like manner, Kulikoff machine-guns facts with vertiginous dispatch, for he not only knows everything there is to know about the small farmer in the colonial period — he means us to know it. But, like a pointilliste painting, it is meaningless up close, and a blur from a distance. A still larger question has to do with the presentation of materials across disciplines. A recent article in the Journal of Economic Literature provides the hook on which to hang this, the principal point of my critique.7 On the assumption that interdisciplinary conversation contributes to the diffusion of knowledge, the authors of that article propose that “actual communication flows” between the various social sciences be measured by the number of ‘high value’ citations an article garners in other journals. To that I would add another metric: the authenticity of the translation from origin to destination across disciplines. Narrative disciplines that import findings from hypothetico-deductive disciplines (and modern economic history is one) have an obligation, both to the reader and to the original author, to define constructed variables, to report the research design as modeled, and the findings as provisional.8 An example of successful ‘translation’ is McCusker and Menard’s Economy of British America, which throughout treats early American economic history as “a laboratory containing sufficient diversity to encourage analysis but enough similarity to allow control of at least some variables.”9 In Kulikoff’s book, on the other hand, I find many examples of what I would consider to be bad ‘translations’: ? Mistaking the size of a study sample for the size of the ‘universe’ from which it was drawn. Thus, “In 1714 the Massachusetts land bank lent to 110 men in Middlesex County; two-thirds were farmers, one-third artisans.” And “between 1650 and 1750 Middlesex County residents took out 619 mortgages.” Kulikoff is citing work of mine here, and in both cases he is confusing the size of a study sample with the size (unknown) of the ‘universe’ from which it was drawn. When these two examples are followed by an example from New York State — “Landholders in two Dutchess County precincts alone took out 329 mortgages between 1754 and 1770″ (all on p. 219) — one wonders if that too is only the sample size. ? To explain migration flows within and among the colonies, Kulikoff declares that the decision to move: a) “was driven by increased land prices in older areas and cheap frontier land” (p. 148); b) “depended on father’s age, the number of children at home, opportunities at home or on the frontier, and previous moves by friends or neighbors” (p. 149); c) depended on prices: “when prices were good, propertied families risked the peril of moving to a frontier; during depressions or wars, they stayed put or moved short distances” (p. 145); d) depended on assets: “only families with assets could move long distances” (p. 145). This is a regression waiting to happen. Regression analysis was imported into social-science history just to prevent ‘effects’ from having an unlimited number of equally plausible ’causes.’ ? “Agricultural productivity rose” (p. 170). Kulikoff is too familiar with economics jargon to use the word ‘productivity’ often, but using it at all imposes an obligation to define the measure of it, particularly when the magnitude (total factor productivity) is a construct, and the measure of it in the original research was proxied, as it so often is, by rents which have data problems of their own. ? The end-notes — again, perhaps, an editorial decision. The practice of bundling all references in a paragraph into one footnote (or end-note) is not uncommon in narrative histories, but in this book virtually every paragraph carries an end-note, and each end-note bundles together as many as twenty citations. This impedes the serious scholar who wants to locate a source or validate the authority of a ‘fact-let.’ In a hypothetico-deductive discipline where the results are for the most part ‘made,’ not ‘discovered,’ their provenance deserves to be known. It would be a great pity if decisions made on the editorial level misjudged the audience for this book. A more sophisticated treatment of the staggering amount of quantitative material between its covers might have garnered it the gratitude and respect it would then deserve. Notes: 1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1849), quoted on p. 5. 2. Two thousand is my rough count, approximately four hundred of the two thousand works were published in the last decade, and I recognized seventy-five as the works of economic historians. 3. Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 34. 4. A meme — “An idea that seems to have a life of its own,” Edward Rothstein, “The Mysterious Meme, A Seductive Metaphor,” New York Times (August 2, 2002), p. A15. 5. J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, second edition. (London: Butterworths, 1979), pp. 222-24. 6. Andre Aciman, “Proust Regained,” New York Review of Books, July 18, 2002, p.58. 7. Rik Pieters and Hans Baumgartner, “Who Talks to Whom? Intra- and Interdisciplinary Communication of Economics Journals,” Journal of Economic Literature (June 2002), p. 484. 8. This issue is knowingly discussed by John Komlos in “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Historical Analysis,” in Peter Karsten and John Modell, editors, Theory, Method and Practice in Social and Cultural History (New York: New York University Press, 1992). 9. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 31-32. Winifred B. Rothenberg, Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University, is the author of From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
How did the 18th century farm wives contribute to their families?How did farmwives throughout the colonies in the eighteenth century contribute to their families? Wives acted as helpmates to their husbands and performed both domestic and agricultural tasks.
Which of the following consequences of the eighteenth century Great Awakening made it historically significant?Effects of the Great Awakening
The Great Awakening notably altered the religious climate in the American colonies. Ordinary people were encouraged to make a personal connection with God, instead of relying on a minister. Newer denominations, such as Methodists and Baptists, grew quickly.
How did the Pietism movement of the 18th century differ from Puritanism?How did the Pietism movement of the eighteenth century differ from Puritanism? Pietism stressed an individual's relationship with God.
What made the British authorities wary of declaring war?What made the British authorities wary of declaring war against the French in North America in 1754? They believed the American colonists were incapable of cooperating in their own defense.
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