1792
Reviews of Books
This cleverly named account neatly evokes Herman
Melville's masterpiece to raise the seemingly straightforward question of what transpired on shore, once
men left in search of profit and nature's leviathan. In
tracing the impact of the whalefishery on the lives of
women in New England, Lisa Norling simultaneously
chronicles the evolution of an important sector of the
economy and the development of domestic ideals
increasingly at odds with that industry's demands. The
intersection between the two informs a complex and
well-written work of social and economie history.
An examination of communities built around the
whalefishery provides both organizational and analytical structure. Focusing on Nantucket, Norling
sketches out the demographic, religious, and economie
dynamics that accompanied the island's rise to prominence in the whaling industry. There, a predominantly
Quaker population closely linked by faith and marital
ties practiced a cooperative ethos and flexibility in
domestic arrangements that translated into support
networks. Quaker practices of group conformity and
sociability sustained close community ties. Women and
children engaged in flexible living arrangements, with
extended families cohabiting for periods. Such residential patterns eased some of the loneliness and other
burdens that plagued the wives of whalers. Lending
economie support, shipowners extended credit to the
families of their crews in anticipation of the portion of
the catch each man might earn. "Industrial paternalism" on Nantucket provided dense underpinnings for
whaling, enabling those on shore to survive in the
absence of husbands and regular influxes of income.
While sea wives contributed to their families' livelihood by sewing, keeping boarders, and performing a
range of other typically female tasks, their work was
seen as supplemental to the primary economie activity
of their men's whaling. Their temporary status as
virtual widows thus did not challenge patriarchal domestic relations. When they exercised personal agency,
their conduct fit within the purview of "deputy husbands," whose actions revealed deep familiarity with
the workings of the whaling industry and porous
boundaries between work, home, family, ,and community. In making this case, Norling expands the applicability of the concept.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the elements
of Nantucket's culture that sustained the whalefishery
underwent a variety of stresses, some generated by the
American Revolution and the expansion of the industry, that worsened the lot of sea wives. More important
than the considerable economie or political development were changes in the areas of religion and romance. Attempts to reinvigorate Quaker piety generated a spate of disciplinary actions and precipitated a
decline in church affiliation. As the population of
non-Yankee workers who came to the island to participate in the whalefishery grew, Quakers became a
small minority. Diversity in religious practice and
ethnicity replaced earlier uniformity.
As Quaker cohesion fell apart in the face of gener-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ational shifts and reform movements, and expectations
regarding ideals of marriage placed growing emphasis
on the primacy of romantic attachments between
husband and wife, women found themselves increasingly isolated from neighbors and dependent on emotional ties to husbands gone for voyages that increased
from months to years. Norling argues that "with the
erosion of Quaker influence, more and more young
islanders were susceptible to the radical new ideas and
love and marriage" in imported reading material (p.
103). This assertion is a difficult one to prove. Drawing
on what she can establish regarding reading habits and
mining to good effect the correspondence between
spouses, Norling makes a strong if not conclusive case
for the cultural weight of these new models. One of the
most engaging aspects of this work is the vivid prose
with which Norling captures intimate bonds and their
ebb and flow.
The processes Norling outlines for Nantucket were
taking place elsewhere as well—notably in the other
community she explores at length, New Bedford, the
mainland town where the whalefishery became centered in the nineteenth century. As specialization and
the global reach of whaling increased and voyages
lengthened, men at sea became increasingly dependent
on women to keep them in touch with and maintain
their place in the community. Sea wives also aided
whaling spouses by providing them with creature comforts, products of female work typically conceptualized
in terras of their sentimental value. That symbolic
linking of women's assistance with "love" rather than
labor diminished the economie value attached to their
endeavors, cloaking them in the language of domesticity. Yet women continued to perform a variety of tasks
and income-generating activities throughout the period.
In charting the course of whaling voyages and the
kinds of labor they entailed, Norling evokes a masculine world of hierarchy, class, and hardship that
Melville would have recognized. In tying those men to
the women on shore and establishing their emotional
and economie connections to a world of women, she
does more than populate the towns the men vacated.
She offers a subtle and nuanced account of changing
ideals and behavior, of the mutual dependencies of
women and men united and separated by economie
endeavor.
PATRICIA CLEARY
California State University,
Long Beach
ALLAN KULIKOFF. From British Peasants to Colonial
American Farmers. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 484. Cloth $59.95, paper
$22.50.
Allan Kulikoff has given us a broadly conceived,
synthetic account of the economie and social lives of
early American farmers. He sees his study as parallel
to but distinct from other "master narratives" of early
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Canada and the United States
America: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard's
Economy of British America 1607-1789 (1985), D. W.
Meinig's Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (1986), Jack P. Greene's
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early
Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American
Culture (1988), and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's
Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). While
the chapters are arranged chronologically, the focus of
each is topical, and the result is one of the most
distinctive aspects of the work: anecdotes and evidence
from throughout the colonies (and, in some chapters,
from disparate places in Britain and Germany) are
lumped together in a way that challenges the regional
analysis of most other synthetic studies. The approximately 300 pages of text are buttressed by more than
170 smaller-print pages of notes and bibliography,
which will prove a gold mine for anyone trying to
reference writing about the experiences of early rural
Americans. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and the
like, of course, get hardly any mention.
Kulikoff argues that the capitalist transformation of
European peasant economies lay behind most of the
emigration from Britain and Germany, that most
immigrants came in search of land and that most found
it, that the search for land opened new frontiers in the
eighteenth century just as it had opened tidewater
areas in the seventeenth, and that land hunger lay
behind the wars of annihilation waged against Native
Americans. In his detailed description of the farm
households that were the basic building blocks of the
colonial rural economy, Kulikoff emphasizes two
points. First, while most households sold erop surpluses in the market economy and provided for some
of their own subsistence needs, the local exchange of
produce and goods, what Kulikoff calls "the borrowing
system," sustained most households most of the time.
Second, he argues that households were organized
around a central contradiction that assigned older men
the status of patriarchs, even though the survival of the
household depended on the labor of all family members, particularly the patriarch's wife. In his concluding
chapter on rural areas during the American Revolution, he describes how the "farm economy nearly
disintegrated" (p. 256) as both the borrowing system
and labor markets were shut down by the fighting,
currency inflation, and the attempts of black Americans to escape slavery. Kulikoff concludes the chapter
with a dark restatement of the Turner thesis, worth
quoting fully: "As long as unimproved land could be
stolen from the Indians, the cycle of land development
and land scarcity in older areas, Indian removal from
their farms and hunting grounds, migration to new
frontier, pioneer squatting, followed by purchase and
development of land, could be repeated endlessly" (p.
288). Appropriately (keeping Turner in mind), in the
afterword that follows, Kulikoff argues that all this set
the stage for a "democratie class of small property
holders" (p. 291).
Can we find much that is new in such well-plowed
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1793
ground? By frequently asking why some people emigrated from Britain or German when most did not, and
by noting that many who left their homes did not come
to British North America, Kulikoff has captured the
precision with which questions about emigration and
immigration are currently being asked by historians;
some of his paragraphs, however, loaded with data
from various localities, will leave readers longing for
more maps or more careful regional distinctions. His
description of the "borrowing system" elegantly finds a
middle ground in the contentious debate over capitalist characteristics of the colonial farm economy. I read
account books differently than he does and see much
more evidence in them of market-related behavior. 1
think he downplays the importance of wage labor
outside New England, and he spends far too little time
on the role of consumption in encouraging greater
market participation. Kulikoff's integration of matenals from women's history into a general synthesis of
economie life in colonial America is among the best
yet written, but it will take more work to establish
whether the contradictions between authority and
responsibilities in the household created the tensions
and anxieties he describes. The description of the
effect of the Revolutionary War on rural America is
better done than any previous account (and there are
really no others that approach the subject as broadly as
he does), although I think he overstates the case for
the destruction caused by the war. Perhaps the most
significant challenge Kulikoff faced was placing Native
Americans and African-American slaves in a narrative
about white householders of European ancestry, and
writing a synthesis in which the absence or presence of
Indians and slaves does not change the essential
argument (most rural householders shared a common
world, regardless of regional variations) without trivializing the role they did play in the colonial rural
economy. He does this well and thus produces another
distinctive "master narrative" of early America.
PAUL G. E. CLEMENS
Rutgers State University
PETER S. ONUF. Jefferson's Empire: The Language of
American Nationhood. (Jeffersonian America.) Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2000. Pp. xi,
250. $27.95.
Peter S. Onuf's book is a collection of five essays, an
introduction, and an epilogue, all of which have previously been presented either as papers, book chapters, or addresses. All of the chapters represent meditations on Thomas Jefferson's thought and include
material on Jefferson's views on the Indians, a republican empire, the Revolution of 1800, the meaning of
union, and African Americans and slavery.
Despite Jefferson's "generous assessment of the
human potential of Indians" as "natural republicans,"
with a primitive "moral sense of right and wrong" (p.
19), he regarded Native peoples as stuck in a prehistory stage that gave them the bleak alternative of
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