The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America
Author(s): Allan Kulikoff
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 120-144
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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The Transition to
Capitalism in Rural America
Allan Kulikoff
I
N
I904
MaxWeber reada papercomparingEuropeanand American
agrarian society at the International Congress of Arts and Sciences,
held as part of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis,
Missouri. Weber, who had traveled across America for three months
before the meeting, visiting both cities and farms, contrasted the feudal
social relations still found in parts of Europe with capitalist agriculture in
the United States. European peasants had traditionally produced to
support a seigneurial class and to supply their own needs. "The past two
thousand years," he concluded, "did not train the peasant to produce in
order to gain profit." In contrast, "the American farmer is an entrepreneur
like any other" and had long since become "a rationally producing small
agriculturist."This was especially true in northern wheat-producing areas,
where a farmer was "a mere businessman" who believed in "absolute
economic individualism." The Civil War had destroyed the "aristocratic,
social, and political centers of the rural districts," thereby consolidating
capitalist agriculture.'
The issues Weber raised have been a mainstay in agriculturalhistory for
over half a century. Early debates revolved around questions of subsistence agriculture and self-sufficiency on northern farms in the colonies and
the new nation and the timing of the development of commercial
Mr. Kulikoff is a member of the Department of History at Northern Illinois
University. Acknowledgments: versions of this essay were presented to seminars
at Northern Illinois University, Colgate University, the Newberry Library,and the
University of Chicago. It was expertly criticized at these meetings by William
Beik, Edward Cook, Kathleen Conzen, Robin Einhorn, Mary Furner, C. H.
George, Susan Rugh, Robert St. George, and Daniel Scott Smith. I would
particularly like to thank Stanley Engerman, Robert Margo, Marvin Rosen, and
Sean Wilentz for extensive and valuable comments. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has
nurtured every aspect of this project, including this essay, providing detailed
comments, superb theoretical insights, and analytical criticism.
1 Max Weber, "Capitalismand Rural Society in Germany," in H. H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., FromMax Weber:Essays in Sociology(New York,
I946),
363-385, quotations on pp. 365, 363, 366, 364, 369. Weber's American
travels are detailed in Henry Walter Brann, "Max Weber and the United States,"
SouthwesternSocial Science Quarterly, XXV (I944), i8-30, and the exposition
congress is examined in A. W. Coats, "American Scholarship Comes of Age: The
Louisiana Purchase Exposition I 904," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXII ( I96 I),
404-4
I 7.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISMI
2I
agriculture. Using aggregate data, historians in the 1950s and i960s
developed descriptions of a dominant commercial economy that replaced
the earlier prevailing view that most northern farmers subsisted outside
the market. A second debate, over the existence of capitalist economic
relations on southern plantations, began in the i960s with Eugene D.
Genovese's challenge of the easy identification of staple agriculture with
capitalism.2
During the past decade, American historians and historical economists
have participated in a reinvigorated discussion of the temporal and
agrarianorigins of American capitalism. Focusing on family farmers in the
Northeast and the upland South, these scholars have emphasized the
meaning of capitalism, the character of rural economic exchange, and the
degree of market participation-issues generally missing in the earlier
northern debate. Participants have not only borrowed theories from
neoclassical economics, Marxian economics, and cultural anthropology,
but they have produced a substantial body of empirical research based on
systematic examination of individual-level data (like account books)
neglected by earlier scholars.3
This essay seeks to describe this new debate over the transition to rural
capitalism, assess its achievements, critique its deficiencies, and suggest a
plausible way to overcome problems the debate has raised. The subject
2Winifred B. Rothenberg, "The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, I750I), 283-285,
summarizes the earlier
northern debate; for the southern debate see Genovese, The Worldthe Slaveholders
Made: Two Essays in Interpretation(New York, i969), esp. pt. I, and (in contrast)
James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders(New York,
1855," Journal of EconomicHistory, XLI (i98
I982).
3 Among the key essays in the debate are Michael Merrill, "Cash Is Good to Eat:
Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States," Radical
History Review, No. 3 (I977),
42-7I; James A. Henretta,
"Families and Farms:
Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America," William and Mary Quarterly,3d Ser., XXXV
(I978), 3-32; Christopher Clark, "The Household Economy, Market Exchange,
and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, I 8oo-
i
86o,"Journal of Social
History, XIII (I979), i69-i89; Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The
Countrysidein the Age of Capitalist Transformation.Essays in the Social History of
Rural America (Chapel Hill, N.C., i985), esp. the editors' introduction, 3-2 I;
Gregory Nobles, "Capitalism in the Countryside: The Transformation of Rural
Society in the United States," Rad. Hist. Rev., No. 4I (i988), i63-I77; Rothenberg, "Market and Massachusetts Farmers,"Jour. Econ. Hist., XLI (i98I), 2833I4,
and "The Emergence
of a Capital Market in Rural Massachusetts,
I730-
I838," ibid., XLV (i985), 78i-808;James T. Lemon, "EarlyAmericans and Their
Social Environment," Journal of Historical Geography,VI (I 980), I I 5- I 3 I; Joyce
Appleby, "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in the Early Republic,"
Journal of American History, LXVIII (i982), 833-849; and Bettye Hobbs Pruitt,
"Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," WMQ, 3d Ser., XLI (i984), 333-364. This article cites examples from the
growing literature on the debate rather than providing a full list of citations for
each point.
122
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
should have a central place in early American social and economic history
because it illuminates broader patterns of class conflict and social cohesion
in the countryside, where the vast majority of Indians, settlers, and slaves
lived. Whether one contends that capitalism arrived with the first colonists
or that it came to dominate the countryside only after much struggle
depends upon how that term is defined, and the definition in turn
structures debate about economic exchange.
PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION
At the risk of oversimplification, it can be said that participants in the
debate on the transition to capitalism in rural America have formulated
two contradictory visions, one influenced by neoclassical economics and
economic history, the other by social history and anthropology. Whether
economists or historians, those influenced by neoclassical economics
stress the impact of market forces on human behavior and seek to
document and explain the spread of market processes through rural
society. Despite borrowing from a wide range of theories-including the
"new")social history, the cultural Marxism of E. P. Thompson, structural
Marxist theories, and various anthropological frameworks-those influenced by social history all seek to uncover patterns of economic and social
behavior of ordinary rural people and to relate their behavior to the social
relations of production and to social and political consciousness. I will use
the terms "market historians" and "social historians" for the two groups,
but readers should understand how imprecise the terms are and how broad
both theoretical and substantive disagreements within each group can be.
Market historians insist that America developed out of vigorous capitalist expansion and that early American farmers were capitalists. They
measure capitalism by commercial expansion and household participation
in commodity markets. As markets developed and became more integrated (a process measured by price convergence), farmers participated in
them more fully. Market historians do disagree about the amount of
change within the capitalist economy. Some insist that colonists came with
a capitalist ideology and see change as further embeddedness in the
system; others see substantial changes within capitalism at the end of the
eighteenth century.4
Social historians start with Marx's distinction between production for
use (use-value) and production for exchange (exchange-value). In economies where use-value predominates, householders control the means of
production and make some commodities for markets but use most of what
they produce in their households or exchange it in their local communities. The value of the goods is determined not by market prices but by
4Compare, for instance, Rothenberg's description of change in "Market and
Massachusetts Farmers,"Jour. Econ. Hist., XLI (i981), 283-3I4,
with Lemon's
"Early Americans and Their Social Environitent,"Jour. Hist. Geog., VI (i980),
I I 5-13I.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I23
their utility to those who produce or use them. Markets in such economies
are places, regulated by the state or custom, where people trade goods or
labor and where merchants facilitate commerce over local hinterlands.
Rural areas in the North and the upland South, far from urban markets,
these scholars believe, shared characteristicsof noncommercial economies'
until the mid-nineteenth century. In commercial economies, dominated
by exchange-value, all goods are commodities that have market prices, and
exchanges are always made through the abstract medium of money.
Markets in commercial economies become both places and abstract
processesthat set prices and distribute goods over vast regions. A capitalist
economy is a commercial economy, where profits are divided between the
original producers (petty capitalists, artisans, wage laborers) and a class of
capitalists who own and control the means of production. Capitalists often
expropriate part of the value of goods made by the original producer.
Workers in capitalist economies sell their labor-power in abstract labor
markets, thereby acting as if they are commodities. Capitalist transformation is not an automatic process but one fraught with conflict and violence,
as capitalists attempt to reduce independent farmers to dependence upon
wages. Agrarian historians who share such views can point to planters and
sharecroppers in the postbellum South or to fruit producers and migrant
workers in California as examples of fully capitalist rural areas.5
While admitting that rural Americans frequently exchanged goods on
local and even regional and international commodity markets, social
historians contend that most exchange was for the immediate use of the
farm household or its neighbors. Farmers sought land (in one version) not
to gain profit (or even to maximize utilities) but to maintain complex
lineages and to sustain a traditional communal and noncapitalist mentalited
or to ensure old-age security. In another version, the dominance of
noncommercial exchange of labor and goods between local households,
nearly all of whom owned some land and were able to partially feed and
clothe themselves by their own labor, is emphasized.6
5See Karl Marx, Capital.:A Critique of Political Economy,ed. Ernest Mandel
(New York, I977 [orig. publ. i867]),
chap.
I,
esp. I25-I39,
Marx, Pre-Capitalist
EconomicFormations,ed. E. J. Hobsbawm (New York, i965), and Hobsbawm's
excellent introduction for descriptions of past societies dominated by use-value
67-68,
and the transition to commercial and capitalist economies (see esp. I2-i6,
94-96, IIO-II7). For brief discussions see entries under "exchange" and "usevalue" in Tom Bottomore et al., eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge,
Mass., i983),
I5 5-I 57, 504. The best analysis of "markets" and "the market" from
this perspective is Jean-Christophe Agnew, "The Threshold of Exchange: Speculations on the Market," Rad. Hist. Rev., No.
2I
(I979),
99-ii8.
6For the first version see Henretta, "Families and Farms," WMQ, 3d Ser.,
XXXV (I978), 3-32, and Richard L. Bushman, "FamilySecurity in the Transition
238-256. For
Family History, VI (I98I),
from Farm to City, I750-I8so,"Journalof
the second see Merrill, "Cash Is Good to Eat," Rad. Hist. Rev., No. 3 (I977),
42-7I. Social historians in this debate generally ignore arguments about the
creation of a peculiar slave society in the staple-producing South advanced by
I24
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
This debate over the definition of capitalism is, in part, a controversy
over the utility of two different classical economic models originating in
interpretations of Karl Marx and of Adam Smith. Where one side, looking
through Marxian lenses, sees some of the social relations embedded in
such documents as account books as evidence of noncommercial exchange, the other decries a lack of precision, demands testable (and
deniable) quantitative definitions of capitalism, or prefers that the term
not be used. Such critiques sometimes lead to reiteration of theory and
brusque rejection of evidence proffered by the other side. Unfortunately,
the debate on occasion degenerates into name-calling.7
Nonetheless, the debate over the definition (and utility) of capitalism
has a broader significance. It suggests confusion over the nature of
American economic development from initial colonization through the
nineteenth century. Great difficulties prevent an unambiguous description
of early American social and economic relations. It is clear that settlers to
British North America never established feudal economic relations. Not
only had much of rural England already become fully capitalist by the
mid-seventeenth century, with classes of entrepreneurial landlords, capitalist tenants, and wage laborers, but settlers understood that feudal social
relations would no longer protect their rights-in-land. The "feudal revival"
of the mid-eighteenth century in New York was an attempt by increasingly capitalist landlords to impose ground rent; local residents resisted
these capitalist economic relations in feudal forms. But the expropriation
of peasant land by early English capitalists engendered great conflicts,
from enclosure riots to urban bread riots by displaced peasants. Colonists-often the urban descendants of peasants or rural folk who feared
displacement-migrated, in part, to escape capitalism. Colonists gained
sufficient land to reject the dependence of wage labor and sought,
however incoherently, to devise economic relations within capitalist world
markets that preserved some of the communal and hierarchical ethos
characteristic of local communities in feudal England. As a fully capitalist
Eugene D. Genovese (see particularly Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Genovese,
Fruits of Merchant Capital. Slaveryand BourgeoisPropertyin the Rise and Expansion
of Capitalism [New York, I983], chaps. 2, 5-6, 9, I 2).
7The debate over definitions is most clearly examined in the exchanges over
Henretta's "Families and Farms":James T. Lemon, With a Reply by James A.
Henretta, "Comment on James A. Henretta's 'Families and Farms': Mentalit6 in
Pre-Industrial America," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXVII (i980), 688-700; and over
Rothenberg's "Marketand Massachusetts Farmers":Rona Weiss, "The Market and
Massachusetts Farmers, I750-i850: Comment," and Winifred B. Rothenberg,
"The Market and Massachusetts Farmers:Reply,"Jour. Econ.Hist., XLIII (i983),
475-480, plus Michael A. Bernstein and Sean Wilentz, "Marketing, Commerce,
and Capitalism in Rural Massachusetts," and Winifred B. Rothenberg, "Markets,
Values, and Capitalism: A Discourse on Method," ibid., XLIV (i984), I7I-I78.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I25
economy expanded in the nineteenth century, these attempts continued,
especially in those regions most isolated from commodity markets.8
The rural economy of early America was clearly "transitional." The
precise nature of that transition can be described as either an intensification of capitalist production or a transformation from a noncommercial or
at least noncapitalist economy to a capitalist one. For instance, those who
insist on the early emergence of capitalist economic relations can point to
individual land ownership and the substantial rights of alienation that it
entailed, while those who describe precapitalist social relations can point
to initial communal control over land in New England and the persistence
of primogeniture and entail in the southern colonies. Where one scholar
examining account books sees intricate exchanges of labor and goods
between kindred and neighbors, another insists that these exchanges are
commercial and documents that assertion by comparing prices found in
the account books with prices in urban markets.
One's definition of capitalism structures one's vision of American
society. Market historians reject any idea of a "transition to capitalism"or
of "capitalist transformation" and implicitly hold that economic conflicts
are concerned with the distribution of profits, rather than being class
struggles between systems of economic relations. The social historians'
vision of a precapitalist and noncommercial economic order implies great
8There is a voluminous English literature on the transition from feudalism to
capitalism. One should start with Marx, Capital, ed. Mandel, I, chaps. 26-33. For
recent contributions see Robert Brenner, "AgrarianClass Structure and Economic
Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," and Patricia Croot and David Parker,
"AgrarianClass Structure and the Development of Capitalism,"in T. H. Aston and
C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structureand Economic
Developmentin Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, i985), i0-63, 79-90; Richard
Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, I53&i640
(Madison, Wis., i987); and David Levine, ReproducingFamilies: The Political
Economyof English PopulationHistory (Cambridge, i987). For riots and unrest see
Brian Manning, "The Peasantry and the English Revolution," Journal of Peasant
Studies, II (I975), I33-I58, and Andrew Charlesworth, ed., An Atlas of Rural
Protest in Britain, 1548-i908
(Philadelphia, i983), 8-4I, 63-83. See Marx,
Capital, ed. Mandel, I, chap. 33, for perceptive comments about colonies in a
capitalist world. Social characteristics of migrants are sketched by David W.
Galenson, White Servitudein Colonial America:An EconomicAnalysis (Cambridge,
i98i),
chaps. I-5; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, "Migrants and Motives: Religion
and the Settlement of New England, i630-i640," New England Quarterly,LVIII
(i985), 339-383; and David Cressy, Coming Over:Migration and Communication
betweenEngland and New England in the SeventeenthCentury (Cambridge, i987),
chaps. 2-3. For tenancy and the "feudal revival" in i8th-century America see
Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin, "Feudalism, Communalism, and the
Yeoman Freeholder: The American Revolution Considered as a Social Accident,"
in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essayson the AmericanRevolution
(Chapel Hill, N.C., I973), 256-288, and Sung Bok Kim, Landlordand Tenant in
Colonial New York.Manorial Society,i664-I775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., I978), chaps.
5-8.
I26
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
conflict over the development of capitalism and struggle between noncommercial farmers and capitalist entrepreneurs (whether land speculators or agricultural, financial, or industrial capitalists) over economic
relations.
In my view, the Marxian definition possesses substantial advantages for
the study of rural America. It gives the agrariancritics of capitalism a new
voice, capturing their noncapitalist familial relations and intense nonmarket gift exchanges of goods and labor with neighbors. It suggests that
violence preceded the victory of capitalists and thereby provides a
powerful explanation for intermittent agrarian uprisings of independent
landholding farmers (or those seeking that status) as diverse as New
England-born New York tenants in the mid-eighteenth century and late
nineteenth-century Populists of the cotton South and northern plains.
And it points to cooperation and internal struggles within households over
the sexual division of labor and exchanges between households.
THE DEBATE OVER EXCHANGE RELATIONS
The most exciting part of the American debate over agrariancapitalism
is the controversy over the nature of economic exchange between
households in the Northeast and upland South. This emphasis distinguishes the American debate from those on England and Europe over the
transition from feudalism to capitalism and the privileged role of agrarian
development within it. That controversy emphasizes relations and modes
of production in the decline of feudalism and the coming of agrarian
capitalism, and focuses on such abstract national developments as the
growth of population, the development of regional and national markets,
urban development, the emergence of strong nation-states, and vast class
conflicts encompassing peasants, aristocrats, and merchants. Decidedly
antiromantic, Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars alike sought the origins of
capitalist economic and class relations, paying little attention to the
noncommercial world of peasants embedded in feudal social relations.
Participants in the European debates ignore exchange relations within
individual households or communities for whatever vestiges of use-values
persisted, they influenced neither feudal nor capitalist class relations.9
Where European historians emphasize structural change, American
scholars often privilege cultural issues or combine culture and structure.
To delineate cultural and ideological change, the American debate, unlike
the European, has accentuated the behavior of individual households at
home, in the local community, and in various local and national markets.
Economists and market historians seeking explanations of economic
development within a capitalist world face social historians who wish to
9 Rodney Hilton, ed.,
I976),
reprints a debate
The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London,
mostly found in Scienceand Societyin the early I950s;
Aston and Philpin, eds., BrennerDebate, reprints a Past and Presentdebate of the
I970S
and 1980s.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I27
explain or praise farmers who resist capitalist advance. To sustain these
conflicting views, scholars have plumbed hundreds of farm and store
account books, thousands of probate inventories, and innumerable tax
lists and censuses searching for forms and patterns of exchange.
As this work has proceeded, a quite remarkable convergence on the
substance of social and economic change has occurred among those who
follow the neoclassical and Marxist branches of classical economics.
Granted, the theoretical explanations of the meaning of various forms of
exchange vary markedly, but descriptions of economic patterns and
economic change themselves are often similar. Analysts on both sides
deny familial self-sufficiency, describe patterns of economic exchange
between households or within markets (and argue the relative importance
of the two patterns), and struggle to understand the timing and significance
of economic transformation. When taken together, the different visions of
the meaning of economic exchange and transformation raise new questions that neither alone poses.
Both sides deny the persistence of either subsistence agriculture (an
economic level achieved with a nearly complete absence of exchange) or
self-sufficient farms (nearly total production of a farm's own food and
clothing). Market historians have documented extensive exchange between households and at markets; farmers in much of eastern New
England in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, not only sold goods
on local markets but depended on imports from outside the region for
much of their grain. Occasional charges by market historians to the
contrary notwithstanding, social historians also deny the existence of
self-sufficient households and subsistence agriculture. While they contend
that farm households participated in few commercial market exchanges,
they have described complex systems of local exchange of goods and labor
that permitted households to procure food and cloth that they could not
make themselves. Families with insufficient resources to participate in
exchanges had to sell their labor or personal goods to feed and clothe
themselves. The two sides contend over the degreeof local self-sufficiency
and the extent of market exchange rather than the fact of exchange.10
Both sides see the existence of nonmarket exchange outside of competitive commodity markets. The key issues here are how frequently the
monetary price of goods was set competitively and how the balance
between gift and market exchange changed. Social historians contend that
most exchanges of goods and labor took place between households apart
from competitive markets and that these exchanges were noncommercial
because merchants did not charge explicit interest, farmers rarely even
10 See Pruitt, "Self-Sufficiency and Agricultural Economy," WMQ, 3d Ser., XLI
(i984), 3 33-364, for i8th-century New England and a somewhat unfair critique of
social historians for insisting upon self-sufficiency. For a life-cycle view of relative
self-sufficiency, exchange, and the sale of capital goods see David F. Weiman,
"Families, Farms, and Rural Society in Pre-Industrial America," Research in
EconomicHistory, X ( I988), supplement.
I28
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
implicitly charged interest in accounts with each other, book credit
predominated, accounts stayed on the books for years without a reckoning, and farmers did not create commercial paper that could be sold.
Market historians deny the economic significance of such nonmarket,
"gift" exchanges, pointing to the ubiquity of market exchange and the
necessity that shopkeepers charge implicit interest (in different "cash"and
"credit" prices). Yet the ubiquity of nonmarket exchange is implied in
their work. To write of increasing market embeddedness and increasing
price convergence as Rothenberg does, after all, suggests a time (perhaps
a frontier stage) when market exchange was less common. James T. Lemon
argues that "between a third and a half or more" of the produce of
Pennsylvania farmers was sold on local or international commodity
markets (he does not distinguish the two); the rest was part of a
"subsistence" economy that presumably included reciprocal local exchanges hidden in Lemon's aggregate data on trade, production, and
consumption. "I
In a similar way, both sides document substantial commercial exchange
in developing commodity markets. Market historians have detailed patterns of eighteenth-century international commodity trade from registers
of the Board of Trade and have examined farm account-book transactions
at local stores and on local commodity markets. They argue that commodity exchange predominated from the outset of settlement or that farmers
became increasingly enmeshed in them. Those social historians who insist
upon the preeminence of noncommercial exchange admit that farmers
sometimes sold goods on commodity markets but argue that such sales
were of minimal importance. In a calculation based on the circulation of
money in early America, Michael Merrill has recently suggested that, in
i 8oo, perhaps a quarter of the monetary value of all exchanges took place
in commercial markets. But, he adds, as commercialization permeated the
countryside, the proportion of market exchanges rose to three-quarters by
I87 0.12
A judicious synthesis of these two visions of economic exchange better
describes American reality than either of the two alone. American farmers
clearly lived within a dynamically growing capitalist world economy that
encompassed the entire North Atlantic rim. Nearly all of them participated more or less in commodity markets, to procure money to pay taxes
and buy imported manufactured goods. Nonetheless, a system of noncommercial exchange developed in most rural communities based on male
householder reciprocity (and, as these scholars ignore, upon exchanges
Rothenberg, "Market and Massachusetts Farmers,"Jour. Econ. Hist., XLI
Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country. A GeographicalStudy of
28I-3I4;
Early SoutheasternPennsylvania (Baltimore, I972), chap. i, esp. 27-29.
12Michael Merrill, "A Survey of the Debate over the Nature of Exchange in
Early America" (paper presented at the Social Science History Association
meeting, New Orleans, I987), 9-I0.
11
(i98I),
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I29
between women) rather than competitively set market prices. This system
was imbued with great cultural significance by farm families.
Examination of the relationship between reciprocal local exchange
networks and market exchange not only resolves difficulties in both
market and social history analysis but potentially opens up exciting new
questions about both economic behavior and political and economic
ideology. The perpetuation of local exchange between households, outside of markets, when local and regional commodity markets expanded,
shows the need to look beyond the obvious utility-maximizing behavior
(defined as understanding trade-offs between production and leisure and
as ordering economic preferences) of farmers to the familial goals that lay
behind this kind of behavior.13 In the early stages of commercial expansion, farm families probably used the proceeds of commercial exchange to
sustain and even create new social networks outside the marketplace.
How and when such exchanges waxed and waned, and their precise
relationship to frontier development, commercial exchange, and capitalist
advance, need further analysis. And the continuing and growing importance of commercial exchange in settled areas of the Northeast during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reduces the heroic imagery
of opponents of commercial advance found in some social history versions
of noncommercial exchange. How farmers made decisions-perhaps
unconscious of their effect-to employ farm labor, agree that their
daughters work in factories, or buy negotiable commercial instruments
that thrust them into capitalist economic relations should be added to
analyses of the perpetuation of old ways.
This vision of a complex economic order, filled with a confusing
amalgam of forms of exchange, also clarifies the political economy of the
new nation. During the Revolutionary era ordinary farm men developed
a new ideological framework that legitimated their increasing political
participation. That ideology, related to but hardly identical with romantic
aristocratic agrarianism,grew in part from Adam Smith's arguments about
the willingness of small farmers to innovate; it was reflected in the
systematic economic thought of such Founding Fathers as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. As Merrill has recently shown, these men
espoused a form of "agrarian realism." They insisted that a society
organized around independent small-proprietor enterprises (what Marxists call petty commodity producers) was the best possible social order,
one likely to sustain prosperity. Jefferson, for instance, believed small
farmers to be superior citizens, not because they worked the earth, but
because they avoided complete dependence on markets by partially
making their own subsistence and by selling surpluses on commodity
markets in order to buy what they could not acquire locally. Such an
ideology presumed the growth and utility of commercial markets within a
13For an argument and definition of utility-maximizing see Winifred B. Rothenberg, "The Bound Prometheus," Reviews in American History, XV (i987), 628637.
I30
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
system in which men could make economic (and ultimately political)
decisions because they retained both ownership and control of the means
of subsistence. To maintain independence, freeholders had to stay clear of
such heavy indebtedness or such deep involvement in the market that
creditors or abstract consumer demand could determine the economic
behavior of the household. Those who fed and clothed their families
mostly from the produce and labor of their farms could decide what crops
to grow, what commodities to bring to market, which candidate to support
without undue pressure from anyone.14
Both sides of the debate, finally, agree that both North and South
experienced major economic transformation. This transformation, which
began in the rural Northeast in the third quarter of the eighteenth century,
spread slowly across the country but did not reach more isolated regions
(or former slave societies) until nearly the end of the nineteenth century.
Market and social historians describe these transformations quite differently. Where a student influenced by social history sees a "transition to
capitalism" that entailed great class struggle, a market historian searches
for structural economic change that occurred when farmers chose to
participate in markets.
Focusing on Massachusetts, Winifred B. Rothenberg has provided the
most elaborate structural analysis of economic transformation. Before the
mid-eighteenth century, the rural New England economy was more
isolated from the North Atlantic economy than it was to become. Farmers
participated irregularly in regional commodity markets (shown by relatively low levels of convergence between rural farm prices and urban
wholesale prices); they paid farm laborers a set wage unaffected by labor
markets; and the book debts they accumulated could not be sold on
financial markets. The Revolution, however, was a great watershed:
galloping inflation made older forms of investment precarious; the need to
feed armies and cities apparently created more integrated regional markets; and ideas of systematic individualism led men to question older labor
relationships. Rapid price convergence of agricultural products after the
war suggests that Massachusetts farmers participated with increasing
regularity in regional commodity markets. Fearing renewed inflation,
middling farmers began to invest in commercial paper, exchangeable in
financial markets, and began to pay market wages to the laborers they
hired, giving close attention to seasonal needs for, and local supplies of,
workers. 15
14 See Michael Merrill, "The Political Economy of Agrarian America" (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, i985), chap. 5. Merrill would probably not accept the
spin I put on his arguments. For views that connect agrarianism to aristocratic
nostalgia or American mythology see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The
AmericanWestas Symboland Myth (Cambridge, Mass., I950), Pt. III, and Richard
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform:FromBryan to F.D.R. (New York, I955), chap. i.
15Rothenberg, "Market and Massachusetts Farmers,"Jour. Econ. Hist., XLI
"Emergence of a Capital Market," ibid., XLV (i985), 78i-808,
283-3I4,
(i98I)
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I 3I
While Rothenberg describes grand economic changes, she refuses to
link them together as a "transition to capitalism," preferring to analyze
each change in terms of the growth and transformation of markets. Unlike
historians influenced by Marx, she sees little class struggle in the development of these markets; rather, she implicitly argues, middling and
wealthy farmers chose to participate in labor, commodity, and finance
markets because they increased opportunity for economic advancement
and provided income for an improved standard of living. The key issue
here is economic development; struggles-when they occurred-were
between groups of capitalists over the allocation of resources. This vision
makes it difficult to explain such agrarian uprisings as Shays's Rebellion,
because it misses the ambiguities of farmers who participated in markets
and, at the same time, sought a kind of household autonomy. Moreover,
it ignores the class struggles between these petty producers and a rapidly
growing class of capitalists who dominated the courts.16 But it does point
to the enthusiastic reception of capitalist economic and class relations by
large numbers of middling farmers, men and women who were major
players, one might argue, in the struggle over rural capitalism.
Steven Hahn's examination of upcountry Georgia yeomen, i850-i890,
provides the fullest Marxist explanation of transformation. During the
antebellum decades, Hahn argues, this society was remarkably egalitarian
and free from substantial commercial exchange. Most exchange occurred
between households, and farmers sold little produce on commodity
markets; few farmers owned slaves or grew cotton. Although levels of
cotton production and slaveholding increased in the boom years after
i85o, most farmers resisted commercialization. They maintained an
egalitarian economic order (for white male landowners) by keeping the
range (land not under cultivation) open to the animals of poorer men and
by electing numerous poorer men to public office. The destruction of
slavery led to the formation of a new class of capitalists, insistent upon
commercial development. Because the southern infrastructure was partially destroyed, and cotton prices rose immediately after the war, more
and more upcountry farmers produced the crop on small farms. But, like
the ex-slaves before them, they were frequently forced into debt peonage.
The elimination of the open range (justified by the need for greater
and "The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural
Economy: Massachusetts, I750-i855," ibid., XLVIII (I988), 537-566.
16For rural revolts in the i8th century see Richard Maxwell Brown, "Back
in Brown
Country Rebellions and the Homestead Ethic in America, I740-I799,"
and Don E. Fehrenbacher, eds., Tradition, Conflict, and Modernization:Perspectives
on the American Revolution(New York, I977), 73-99; David P. Szatmary, Shays'
Rebellion:The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection(Amherst, Mass., i98i); and
Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion:Frontier Epilogue to the American
Revolution(New York, I986).
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
I32
productivity) not only increased inequality but symbolized capitalist
advance
17
Hahn's vision of the transition to capitalism, unlike Rothenberg's,
stresses economic and class struggle over control of economic resources.
Political conflict, moreover, was a forum for regulating class struggle. If
markets seem nearly autonomous in the neoclassical version of transformation, in this version they are the consequence of political conflict as well
as abstract economic forces. And like many social historians, Hahn
recaptures the behavior and ideology of the losers in the adoption of
capitalism. But his work may underestimate antebellum commercial
exchange, misidentifying as a noncommercial society what was actually a
frontier economy slowly becoming embedded in commodity markets and
thereby exaggerating the postbellum change and conflict.18
When these two versions of the transition to capitalism are placed side
by side, they raise new questions and present new possibilities for
research. The impact of changing commodity prices and levels of market
embeddedness on farmers' movements and other rural class struggles, for
example, might be examined. The timing of farmers' decisions to participate more fully in the market or to pull back from commercial agriculture
might well be related to farm income or to national prosperity (as
measured by construction of canals or railroads). A full study might
describe, with equal sympathy, the behavior and viewpoints of both
agrarian capitalists and their neighbors who struggled against capitalist
advance. And economists interested in institutional change might well
examine statute and common law to see what impact, if any, they had on
the market relations of production.
PROBLEMS IN THE AMERICAN TRANSITION
DEBATE
The debate over the transition to capitalism in rural America has
generated substantial new historical evidence, insight, and questions. But
it has remained remarkably insulated from other theoretical frameworks.
It needs to incorporate insights from the European debate over the
transition from feudalism to capitalism and from several feminist theories.
Three great problems should be addressed. First, the social and economic
relations that preceded capitalism are not at all clear: the transition from
17 Hahn, The Rootsof SouthernPopulism:YeomanFarmersand the Transformation
of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890
(New York, i983).
18 Such a critique of Hahn's work may be inferred from Lacy K. Ford, "Yeoman
Farmers in the South Carolina Upcountry: Changing Production Patterns in the
Late Antebellum Era,"AgriculturalHistory, LX (i986), I7-37; Weiman, "Families,
Farms, and Rural Society," "Farmersand the Market in Antebellum America: A
View from the Georgia Up-Country,"Jour. Econ. Hist., XLVII (i987), 627-648,
and "The Economic Emancipation of the Non-Slaveholding Class: Upcountry
Farmers in the Georgia Economy," ibid., LXV (i985), 7I-94; and Lacy K. Ford,
"Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the
South Carolina Upcountry,
I865-I900,"JAH,
LXXI (I984),
294-3
i 8.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I33
what to capitalism? Second, the conceptual framework narrows discussion
of economic change, focusing on exchange in local communities and
ignoring production and regional and national agricultural trade. Third, it
presumes that the household is the most fundamental and elementary unit
of social and class organization, thereby precluding examination of internal household processes and especially of gender roles and the sometimes
conflicted relations between husbands and wives.
Where the European debate is conceptually clear, dealing with the
transition from feudalism to capitalism, the American debate is quite
confused. Although all agree that feudalism did not reach these shores, the
social order, economic system, or mode of production that preceded
capitalism in America is rarely specified. Social historians have envisioned
a third economic system-a "household" or "domestic" mode of production-that focuses on exchanges among households in local communities
apart from commodity markets, exchanges without a true market price.
Such a conception, while it illuminates exchange relations, denies the
importance of commercial exchanges found everywhere in early America
and ignores the relation of noncommercial exchange to the expansion of
world capitalism. It also obscures struggles within the household, leading
implicitly to romanticization of a noncommercial "world we have lost."19
One might alternatively argue that the transition was within capitalism-from a rudimentary form of capitalist exploitation, with many petty
capitalists, to a more mature system. Ideas of "stages" of capitalism have
some merit. Proponents accept the capitalist transformation of England as
an achieved fact, pay attention to the bourgeois property relations soon
dominant in the American countryside, relate American development to
the expansion of international commodity markets, and carefully delineate
the process of class formation in rural areas.20 But this model cannot
accommodate the ambiguities and contradictions of early capitalism in
either England or America. English opponents of capitalism, found in the
most developed parts of the realm, accepted some elements of capitalist
production and possessive individualism while rejecting others. Many of
these radicals came to American shores, where they devised economies
within capitalist world markets strikingly noncapitalist and occasionally
19Marshall Sahlins analyzes a "domestic mode of production" most thoroughly
(StoneAge Economics[New York, I972]).
Although Merrill posited a "household
mode of production," he has since rethought the concept ("Cash Is Good to Eat,"
Rad. Hist. Rev., No. 3 [I977],
For critiques see Christopher Clark, "The
42-7i).
Household Mode of Production-A Comment," ibid., No. i 8 (I978), i66-I 7I,
and James W. Wessman, "A Household Mode of Production-Another
Comment," ibid., No. 22 (I979-I980),
I29-I39.
20 Leftist discussion of this issue begins with Marx, Capital, ed. Mandel, I, chaps.
and continues with Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Developmentof Capitalism
26-29,
(New York, I947); Hilton, ed., Transitionfrom Feudalismto Capitalism; and Aston
and Philpin, eds., BrennerDebate.The best American example is Louis M. Hacker,
The Triumph of AmericanCapitalism: The Developmentof Forcesin AmericanHistory
to the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York, I940).
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
I34
even anticapitalist. To see the innumerable struggles over the terms of
development and the use of land as mere conflicts between petty or failed
capitalists and their more successful brothers obscures the profound
differences between the contending classes.21
Early American class relations, then, grew both from early agrarian
capitalism in England and from reactions against it. Settlers and their
descendants could hardly survive outside the North Atlantic system, with
its trade and credit networks, but many had little desire to fully accept the
commodification of land, goods, trade, and labor that capitalism inspired.
Instead, they created-through the development of staple agriculture or
the search for marketable goods, through a search for a labor system that
would permit both economic independence and commerce, through
complex class struggles over the use of land-dynamic and modern class
societies tied to the world market but not fully of it. Southern planters
devised a noncapitalist and increasingly anticapitalist slave regime in the
colonial and antebellum eras; northern farmers relied on petty commodity
production and local exchange for use to keep capitalist class relations at
bay.22
While southern slavery prevented the spread of capitalist relations of
production, the hybrid nature of the economic order of the early
American North provided a porous defense at best against capitalist
advance. Petty producers rejected feudal hierarchy but wanted the fruits
of capitalism without the relations of production that went with it. Frontier
conditions and accidents of geography allowed northern farmers to
establish semiautonomous farms and create noncapitalist social formations
that survived for generations. But wherever capitalists (even the early
hand "manufacturing"capitalists before the machine age) invested their
profits and created new markets, an important minority of farmers rushed
to invest and participate, and soon entire communities found themselves
dependent on markets and forced to share profits with distant capitalists.23
The focus of the debate on economic exchange rather than on the
underlying means of production and productive relations almost automatically ignores fundamental change within the western capitalist economy,
such as the development of international commodity markets in tobacco,
rice, cotton, and wheat. New labor systems, like indentured servitude and
slavery, grew out of these markets and out of the consumer demands
generated by early capitalism. These labor systems profoundly influenced
levels of production, social relations, the mix of commercial and noncom21For the transfer of radical traditions see Peter Linebaugh, "All the Atlantic
and for the most
Mountains Shook," Labour-Le Travailleur, X (i982), 87-I2i,
evocative examination of rural revolt see Hahn, Rootsof SouthernPopulism.
22This perspective is most fully developed in Genovese, Worldthe Slaveholders
Made, pt. I, and Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital, chaps.
I-3,
9-IO.
See n. 22. I am indebted to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who greatly strengthened this formulation.
23
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I35
mercial exchange, and the willingness of ruling classes to accept capitalist
class relations. Moreover, warfare or depressions in the North Atlantic
economy affected household demographic and economic behavior even in
places with little commercial exchange by reducing the supply of money
and capital below that needed to establish farms and sustain local
exchange.
There may have been a dynamic relation between production and
exchange, the one affecting the other. For example, the rise of industrial
capitalism in New England in the middle third of the nineteenth century
created demands for a new semiskilled labor force, thereby encouraging
young women to leave home and work for wages. Their wages, and those
provided by outwork, encouraged commercial exchange and challenged
male authority in the household. In turn, consumer demands made by
these households (in part to replace goods produced by wives participating
in home manufacture or by adolescents working in factories) increased
industrial production.24
All participants in the debate, even those most influenced by neoclassical economics, have focused on discrete local communities, usually on
places presumed to have relatively low levels of commercial exchange, at
least at the beginnings of settlement. They have ignored the staple
economies of the slave South, Great Plains, and California.25These were
obviously fully commercial economies. Study of the relationship of
commercial and noncommercial exchange in these places illuminates the
importance of changes in production. For instance, local markets and
exchange networks of labor and goods developed most fully in the
eighteenth-century Chesapeake, after the adoption of slavery and the
disappearance of booming tobacco prices.26 If this pattern was duplicated
in other staple economies, it suggests that one should look at the creation
of a traditional form of exchange as a response both to developing value
systems and to constricted commodity markets within a capitalist world
economy.
By examining local communities, analysts of the transition to capitalism
have underplayed the significance of the nation-state and nationalizing
processes in the creation of commercial and capitalist economic relations
24Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order:Town and Factory Life in
Rural Massachusetts, i8io-i86o (Cambridge, i983); Thomas Dublin, Womenat
Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts,
i826-i860
(New York, I979).
25 For an analysis close to the terms of the transition debate see Cletus E. Daniel,
Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farm Workers, 1870-194I
(Ithaca, N.Y.,
i98i),
chaps. I-2; for the South see Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Fruits of
Merchant Capital, and Genovese, Worldthe SlaveholdersMade, esp. pt. i.
26 See Allan Kulikoff, Tobaccoand Slaves. The Developmentof SouthernCulturesin
the Chesapeake, i68o-i8oo (Chapel Hill, N.C., i986), 99-I04,
and Lois Green
Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, "Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in
the Chesapeake, i650-i820,"
in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early
America (Chapel Hill, N.C., i988), chap. 4.
I36
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
and in the perpetuation of nonmarket relations of production. The United
States Constitution mandated a national legal system, a continental free
market in goods, and free migration (except for slaves). During the
nineteenth century, moreover, capitalists developed a transportation
system that linked local, regional, and national markets. These changes
profoundly influenced exchange relations in every local community. Two
examples illustrate the pattern. When out-migration reduced the agricultural labor force of New England at the same time as cheap western grain
eliminated some agriculturalmarkets, New England farmers had either to
find new commodities to sell in order to maintain noncommercial exchange networks or search for industrial employment. When a railroad or
canal linked previously isolated locales in New York or the Midwest to
regional markets, middling farmers increased market participation while
those too poor to compete or too wedded to noncommercial exchange had
to leave for a more isolated area.27
National economic development, however, generated vast social and
class conflicts between farmers who sought just enough development to
ensure access to markets, economic independence, and absolute control
over their households and capitalists who wished to devise a fully
integrated national market. The kind of farmers who urged rejection of
the Constitution on these grounds later supported the Jeffersonian
Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats, fighting their Federalist and Whig
opponents over such issues as national land policy, internal improvements,
credit, and banking. It is within the context of these struggles that both the
persistence of noncapitalist exchange systems and the ultimate triumph of
capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century must be seen.28
The politics of revolution and state-making profoundly influenced
agrarian Americans. Although historians have examined extensively the
ideals of American farmers, their emphasis on local communities makes it
difficult to understand changes in rural ideologies and their relation to
27There is a stream of work, of course, that deals with such national issues, often
linking them to regional development (see, for instance, George Rogers Taylor,
The TransportationRevolution, 1815- I 860 [New York, I 9 5 I]; Paul W. Gates, The
Farmer'sAge: Agriculture, 1815-i860 [New York, i960]; Allan R. Pred, Urban
Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities,
1790-1840
[Cambridge,Mass., I973];
and Michael Grossberg, Governingthe
Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica [Chapel Hill, N.C.,
i985]), but most participants in the debate spend little space discussing such
issues.
need far more work on these issues, especially local and state studies (to
28We
complement Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism). Very suggestive of the general
issues are Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth:A Study of the
Roleof Governmentin the AmericanEconomy,Massachusetts,1 7 74- i86i (New York,
I947);
Louis Hartz, EconomicPolicy and DemocraticThought: Pennsylvania, 1776i86o (Cambridge, Mass., I948); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of
AmericanLaw, I 780-i860
(Cambridge,Mass., I977);
andJohn Ashworth,'Agrar-
ians' and 'Aristocrats':Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837-i846
(London, i983).
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I37
broader economic and political processes. The Revolution, for instance,
played a role both in the consolidation of the yeoman class of small
landowning petty producers and in the legitimization of rural capitalism.
Yeomen, who constituted the majority of the "people" needed to fight the
war and to sustain popular sovereignty, demanded an active role in the
formation of public policy and recognition of their high place in the
American social order. Yeomen used their new-found power to sustain
their independence; as a result, a "traditional"producer ideology became
more deeply embedded in local consciousness. This process can be seen in
the successful struggle of Virginia yeomen to gain control over military
procurement policies and in the long conflict over preemption rights to
national lands for original settlers. But the ideology of the Revolution
pointed to possessive individualism, to the political rights of each person
abstracted from family and community. For increasing numbers of farmers
and rural merchants and manufacturers, independence meant freedom to
make binding contracts and to use property as they saw fit, even at the cost
of disturbing the rights of other residents or traditional common rights to
unimproved land or water.29
Just as the debate has ignored productive relations, it has downplayed
dynamics of exchange within the household. All the participants assume
that this was an indivisible unit. Farm households, of course, were
income-pooling units of production that had to sustain themselves, and
husbands and wives had to cooperate in the productive enterprises of the
farm. The presumption of household unity precludes the possibility of
conflict or tension within households, especially between husbands and
wives, over authority, the sexual division of labor, and the distribution of
goods produced by members for consumption, exchange, or sale. Such
conflicts probably existed even in communities most isolated from commercial markets. Moreover, the sexual and age division of labor within
households was profoundly influenced by capitalist transformation and
29No current work combines structure and meaning within the countryside.
The most suggestive works emphasize urban areas in the i8th century. See, for
instance, Jean-Christophe Agnew, WorldsApart: The Market and the Theater in
(Cambridge, i986); Gary B. Nash, The
Anglo-American Thought, I550-1750
Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness,and the Origins of the
American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., I979); and Eric Foner, Tom Paine and
RevolutionaryAmerica (New York, I976). For a summary of the issue of preemption see Gates, Farmer'sAge, chap. 3, esp. 66-69. For land and water see Gary
Kulik, "Dams, Fish, and Farmers:Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century
Rhode Island," in Hahn and Prude, eds., Countryside in Age of Capitalist
Transformation,25-50. I am completing an essay on this topic that will appear in
an anthology edited by Alfred F. Young. For Virginia see Allan Kulikoff, "The
Political Economy of Revolutionary War Service in Virginia," in John Murrin, ed.,
War and Society in Early Americafrom the Aztecs to the Civil War (Philadelphia,
forthcoming).
I38
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
bourgeois ideology, and in turn household gender relations influenced
particular developments within the economy.30
Strangely, historians who examine economic exchange ignore the
transfer of goods and services within the household that produced goods
later traded in the local community. For example, the production of a
piece of homespun cloth in the colonies required cooperation among
husbands, wives, and daughters as well as complex labor exchanges among
neighboring women. Men cultivated the family's flax and herded and
sheared the sheep; women spun yarn, wove cloth (perhaps with male
help), and sewed garments. But since few families cultivated flax and
owned sheep, spinning wheels, and looms, there must have been a
substantial local exchange of goods for labor. Women traded eggs and
butter with neighbors or at local markets, thereby providing essential
income for other transactions dominated by men. Wives may have
engaged in complex nonmarket trade more intensively than men, and in
some noncapitalist local economies they may have added more currency to
the family income than did their husbands. These female exchanges of
goods and labor within and between households can be discovered only by
combining research into account books (where they appear infrequently)
and probate inventories with such sources as court records, letters, and
diaries.31
The romantic imagery sometimes found in descriptions of noncommercial economies stems from this failure to understand the internal dynamics
of patriarchal families. Under the common law, women had no political
role outside the household and little authority within their families but
much responsibility for child care and domestic production. In return,
husbands customarily owed wives financial support. In the best marriages,
a wife served as "deputy husband," working with her spouse in shop or
field and taking over when he was away, thereby achieving a bit of
autonomy and some personal satisfaction. Yet even when women accepted the constraints imposed by law and by their husbands, courts rarely
backed them if husbands became abusive or failed to provide for them.
30 For contrasting theoretical views see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Antebellum
Southern Households: A New Perspective on a Familiar Question," Review of the
Fernand Braudel Center, VII (1 983), 2I5-253,
and Nancy Folbre, "The Logic of
Patriarchal Capitalism: Some Preliminary Propositions" (paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, i987).
For valuable case studies see Joan M. Jensen, Looseningthe Bonds: Mid-Atlantic
Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Conn., i986), and especially Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household:Black and White Womenof the Old
South (Chapel Hill, N.C., i988).
31
Kulikoff,Tobacco
andSlaves,I00-I03,
I79-i80,
43i;
LaurelThatcherUlrich,
"Housewife and Gadder: Themes of Self-Sufficiency and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England," in Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds.,
"To Toil the Livelong Day": America'sWomenat Work, 1780-i980
(Ithaca, N.Y.,
i987),
2I-34;
Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household;Jensen, Loosening
the Bonds.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I39
Violent conflicts over male abuse or the proper familial roles of husbands
and wives could ensue.32
Gender roles were crucial in the transition to capitalism. The incorporation of the northern countryside into urban culture and economy was
predicated on both the growth of cities (and the consumer demand for
food they created) and the desire of bourgeois rural women for increased
amenities in their homes. This, in turn, led rural families to greater market
production, to hire more wage labor, and to purchase urban manufactured
that augmented urban growth, as urban producers
goods-processes
rushed to supply new goods and services. Textile manufacturing provides
an example of this complex process. That craft began as a household task.
Colonial families probably produced little cloth, preferring to buy cheap
imported cloth. But when wars from the I770S to i8i 5 disrupted cloth
imports, home manufacture soared. These new demands placed great
pressure on already-overworked women, who either established ever
more complicated exchange networks with neighboring women or accepted outwork for wages. Women so disliked this added work that they
willingly permitted their daughters to work in textile factories as soon as
they were established. Textile mill towns soon grew into small cities,
setting into motion even more intense urbanization.33
By underestimating struggle within the household, social historians
exaggerate resistance to capitalist economic relations. Whatever the
reality, some middling farm women welcomed opportunities provided
when male capitalists created expanded markets, opened textile mills, or
encouraged education. Wives of wealthy farmers made products such as
butter for sale as well as for home consumption, using the proceeds to
supply their own larders. Daughters who earned factory wages or taught
school and wives who earned money from outwork gained a small measure
of financial independence from their fathers and husbands. Although rural
women failed to win the social and political rights guaranteed to men by
bourgeois individualism, they manipulated bourgeois ideas of the proper
32 Marylynn Salmon, Womenand the Law of Propertyin Early America (Chapel
Hill, N.C., i986), is the best introduction to the status of women under the
common law; for "deputy husbands" see LaurelThatcher Ulrich, GoodWives:Image
and Reality in the Livesof Womenin NorthernNew England, i650- 1750 (New York,
i982),
chap. 2.
33 Contributors to Hilton, ed., Transitionfrom Feudalismto Capitalism, debated
the impact of urban development on capitalism, but for a provocative restatement
of the issue see Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, chap. i. Rolla
Milton Tryon describes the rise and decline of home textile manufacturing
[Chicago, I9I7], chaps.
(HouseholdManufactures in the United States, i640-i86o
4-5, 7-8); James A. Henretta documents increased home manufacture of cloth
during the Revolution ("The War for Independence and American Economic
Development," in Ronald Hoffman et al., eds., The Economyof Early America:The
Revolutionary Period, 1763-1790 [Charlottesville, Va., i988], 45-87); Jensen
provides a case study (Looseningthe Bonds, 87-88); and Dublin shows the results of
the decline of home manufacturing and the rise of factories (Womenat Work).
I40
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
role of women to their advantage, insisting that ideals of domesticity and
child nurture gave them rights within the household and rights over their
own reproductive organs. Such behavior sometimes led to conflicts with
husbands satisfied with older forms of household authority, struggles that
can be clearly seen in passive resistance by wives when husbands insisted
that they leave bourgeois comforts for western frontiers.34
If changing gender roles played an important part in the transition to
capitalism in rural America, we may have to revise our understanding of
the timing of its coming. Christopher Clark's important work on the
Connecticut River Valley illustrates the problem. Clark shows how
farmers in that region readily incorporated numerous changes, including
the beginnings of small factories and workshops and the rise of tobacco
cultivation, into preexisting patterns of local, reciprocal exchange. For
much of the nineteenth century, these farmers seemed to postpone a full
or even partial transition to capitalism. Yet at the same time, Clark shows
how the internal roles of women and men in the household changed in
ways that he refuses to connect with any broader process of capitalist
expansion. If arguments made here are correct, then Clark has documented an ambiguous and partial transition to capitalism, one that left
some earlier forms of economic exchange in place while transforming
relations within the household.35
THE RISE AND DESTRUCTION OF YEOMAN SOCIETY
There is no ideal solution for resolving problems raised by the
American transition debate. Yet it is evident that the American economy
survived for several centuries in a transitional state-clearly not feudal and
not yet fully capitalist, but located in an increasingly capitalist world. What
is needed is a framework that encompasses regional differences and
national processes, economic exchange in markets (both commercial and
noncommercial) and in the household, and the subtleties of both class and
gender relations and struggles.
Tracing the formation and ultimate destruction of yeoman society does,
I think, meet some of the problems involved in the debate over the
transition to capitalism. One must immediately admit that the term
"yeoman" can be extremely misleading. Yeomen in England were defined
quite differently from their nominal counterparts in the American colonies and new nation. In England they were commercial farmers and
34Jensen, Loosening the Bonds; Dublin, Women at Work, and "Women and
Outwork in a Nineteenth-Century New England Town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampin Hahn and Prude, eds., Countryside in Age of Capitalist
shire, i830-i850,"
Transformation,5 I-70; Margaret K. Nelson, "Vermont Female Schoolteachers in
5-30John Mack
the Nineteenth Century," Vermont History, XLIX (I98I),
Faragher, Womenand Men on the OverlandTrail (New Haven, Conn., I979).
35 Christopher Frederic Clark, "Household, Market and Capital: The Process of
Economic Change in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, i 8oo-I 86o" (Ph.D.
diss., Harvard University, i982).
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I4I
sometimes tenants near the top of a complicated agriculturalhierarchy; in
America they were petty producers who grew much of their own food and
participated in commercial markets. Moreover, the term connotes a
somewhat romantic view, a myth of the American past, one less involved
in class relations, class struggle, gender conflict.36 Carefully defined,
however, it can be used to great profit in ways that address a wide range
of significant questions about class relations and gender, exchange and
production.
"Yeoman" can be construed as a class term, relating to a specific group
of farmers-petty producers who owned the means of production (as
absolute owners) and participated in commodity markets in order to
sustain familial autonomy and local exchange. From the mid-eighteenth
century to the end of the nineteenth, such men controlled the operation
of their farms. They decided what crops to produce, how to divide family
labor among farm tasks, whether and when to grow crops for distant
commodity markets. Practicing "safety-first"agriculture, they produced
much of the food they consumed and tried to procure the rest through
trade with neighbors. Using mostly family labor, they occasionally hired
hands but treated those hands as family dependents.37
Yeoman farmers can be contrasted with capitalist farmers who sought
greater market embeddedness, concentrated on staple crops, and on
occasion bought financial instruments. Seeking greater profits and a
bourgeois life-style, they purchased machinery and hired wage laborers to
increase their output and profits. They treated their hired hands as
laborers and paid a market rather than traditional wage. They owned their
land but often transferred control over its use to financial capitalists who
determined which market crops to grow. The more risks they took, the
more they had to buy food from local storekeepers. Often they had been
yeomen, but slowly, imperceptibly, even unconsciously, they became
petty capitalists while continuing to espouse ideals of independence long
after such ideals had ceased to have economic meaning for them.38
One can identify yeoman farmers and understand their behavior only in
their relations with other classes, such as rural capitalists, great planters,
slaves, or wage laborers. The strategies yeomen pursued to achieve
economic independence-what crops they grew, how deeply they committed themselves to market production, what tools they purchased, how
often they hired workers-were shaped by capitalist expansion. For a
36 For contrasting examinations of this problem see Smith, Virgin Land, and
Folbre, "Logic of PatriarchalCapitalism."
37There is no adequate description of the yeomen as a class, but one can find
hints in Smith, Virgin Land, chaps. I I-I 5; Chester E. Eisinger, "The Freehold
Concept in Eighteenth-Century American Letters," WMQ, 3d Ser., IV (I947),
42-59; and Mary E. Young, "Congress Looks West: Liberal Ideology and Public
Land Policy in the Nineteenth Century," in David M. Ellis et al., eds., The Frontier
in American Development:Essays in Honor of Paul Wallace Gates (Ithaca, N.Y.,
i969), 78-83, 94-97, I05-io8.
38 For a valuable example of the process see Daniel, Bitter Harvest, chaps. I-2.
I42
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARYERLY
century after the Revolution, capitalists became ever more powerful as
they gained control over production and the labor process. As industrial
capitalists replaced the petty manufacturersof the late eighteenth century,
yeomen were forced into greater indebtedness by financial capitalists or
railroad magnates and saw their sons and neighbors adopt capitalist
agriculture or fall into wage labor. Ultimately, capitalists destroyed the
yeomanry as a class, and the countryside became the home of small
capitalists, who struggled with their wealthier counterparts over the
distribution of farm output while subjecting wage laborers to ever-greater
labor discipline. The precise timing of this process varied from region to
region, occurring earliest in the Northeast but not until after the Civil War
in parts of the South and West.
"Yeoman" had been a common designation of occupation and status in
the eighteenth-century northern colonies, apparently including landowning farmers who worked their own land but excluding gentleman
farmers.39By the late eighteenth century, the word had acquired status in
American political debate. While both political parties appealed to the
yeomanry and created myths of yeoman independence and virility, the
term appealed most to Jeffersonian Republicans and later to Democrats. It
slowly came to mean farmers who owned small tracts of land and traded on
local and national markets but who retained economic autonomy because
they produced much of their own food and avoided entangling indebtedness. It was understood in both North and South-if in somewhat
different ways. Adoption of the word "yeoman" thus points to a nationalizing process, to conflicts over development in the nineteenth century,
and to inter- and intra-regional consensus and conflict as well.
The word yeoman is implicitly comparative, suggesting differences with
England, Europe, and other white colonial societies. There was, to be sure,
capitalist transformation of the countryside in both the old and new
worlds, a process that extended from the sixteenth through the end of the
nineteenth century and beyond. It was the long survival of the American
yeoman class, despite struggles with a dynamic class of capitalists, that may
have been nearly unique. But use of the term does not point to such
explanations of "American exceptionalism" as the American frontier or
"American character,"but, rather, to different roads to capitalist development based on the progress of capitalism in European nations and the
social characteristics of Amerindians. Settlers in the English colonies left
a dynamically growing capitalist economy but rejected the commodification of labor already occurring there. Controlling their own labor, they
became independent producers, the sturdy yeomen of our rural society.
Another yeoman class developed in Upper Canada (Ontario), settled by
English and loyalist migrants who, like Americans, had experienced early
capitalist development. Other colonies in the Americas, settled by Euro39 For the use of "yeoman" as an occupational designation see Mary M.
Schweitzer, Custom and Contract: Household, Government,and the Economyin
Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, I 987), 72-74.
TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM
I43
peans from seigneurial societies, had no similar class. Quebec, which was
similar in many ways to New England (Amerindians there had a similar
culture; population growth was rapid; a mixture of subsistence production
and trade of surpluses was common), developed a seigneurial society with
vestiges of feudal relations of production similar to that of France. What
was exceptional about the rural United States, then, was not the development of capitalism but the formation of a transitional class of yeomen,
living in a capitalist world but not of it.40
Moreover, the story of yeomen may have been unique among groups
and classes in the United States. The struggles of yeomen and capitalists
bear only superficial similarities to conflicts between Indians and whites or
between workers and manufacturers. Indians shared with yeomen the goal
of local self-sufficiency in food and extensive gift exchange. The representatives of English merchant capitalists trading with the Indians persuaded or forced them into extensive trade relations, and Indian dependence grew as whites destroyed their means of independent subsistence
and seized their lands.41Urban workers shared with yeomen a republican
producer ideology (encompassing a labor theory of value), an insistence
on looking at themselves as economically independent, and struggles to
control their own labor. But capitalists owned the workplace and soon the
tools and machines used in production; workers became increasingly
dependent on a market wage set in unequal competition with capitalists.
At the start of the process, journeymen insisted that their skills constituted their capital, but as a more minute division of labor debased their
skills, only their labor power remained.42Yeomen-unlike either Indians
or the'urban proletariat-owned land, the means of production, and
insisted that that land provided the base of their independence and
endowed their skills with great economic meaning.
"Yeoman" is gender-specific and implies dominance of both the house40 For Quebec see Richard Colebrook Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early
Canada: A GeographicalStudy (Madison, Wis., i966), and Allan Greer, Peasant,
(Toronto,
Lord, and Merchant:Rural Societyin Three QuebecParishes, I 740-1840
i985). For Upper Canada see Lillian F. Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada
(Toronto, i968), and David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers:Families, Land, and Social
Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto, i98i).
41 Among many fine works see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians,
Colonists,and the Ecologyof New England (New York, i983); FrancisJennings, The
Invasion of America:Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill,
N.C., I975), pt. I; and Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "Food Marketing and Interethnic
Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Lower Mississippi Valley," Food and Foodways, I (i986), 279-3IO.
42The most important works include Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic:New
York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York,
i984); Herbert G. Gutman, Work,Culture, and Societyin Industrializing America:
Essaysin AmericanWorking-Classand Social History (New York, I97 7), and Power
and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin (New York,
and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York,
i987);
I 789- 1860 (New York, I 986).
I44
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
hold and the polity by domestic patriarchs. If not carefully used, it might
refer to a placid "world we have lost," without gender conflict, in which
male dominance was unquestioned and women were unimportant. But
properly used, the term points to power relations that denied female
individualism and insisted that women were part of a male-dominated
household. The wives of yeomen (or "yeoman women"?) were precisely
that-wives, without separate political or social identities.43 One can
examine the sorts of conflicts such a class-and-gender system inevitably
entailed as well as compare it to the very different gender struggles that
came from capitalist transformation, when women began to insist upon
female individualism and their own autonomy and, at the least, their
domination of the household sphere.
Finally, the term "yeoman" points to both a capitalist and a noncapitalist
world. Yeomen were embedded in capitalist world markets and yet
alienated from capitalist social and economic relations. The system of class
and gender relations yeomen made was extraordinarily fragile, fraught
with internal contradictions. They participated in commodity markets with
regularity-but only to sustain noncommercial neighborhood networks.
They sought absolute ownership of landed property like the bourgeoisie-but used property to sustain patriarchalpower at home and complex
neighborhood kinship ties. They moved West to maintain the class society
they had devised-but the sale of land and its ready alienation was a
powerful solvent of any noncapitalist social order. The revolutionary
ideals that legitimated their political participation sustained an ideology of
individualism that privileged capitalist economic development and gave
their wives authority in the home that destroyed their patriarchalpower.
They had struggled with northern gentlemen and southern great planters,
but these conflicts had protected their authority at home and in the
community; when capitalists replaced gentlemen, a struggle ensued that
left them little social space. One is less surprised at the victory of
capitalists, whether farmers, financiers, or even farm wives, over yeoman
farmers than at the intensity of the struggle and the centuries it took
before capitalism dominated the countryside.
The transition from yeoman societies to capitalism in America, then,
entailed a complicated series of processes, at the same time regional and
national, involving household and market and gender and class relations.
This transition had started at the outset of settlement but had hardly
finished by the end of the nineteenth century. A vigorous examination of
empirical data in the context of this spacious framework may well add
measurably to our understanding of rural transformation.
43For the problem of female individualism see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's
brilliant essay "Property and Patriarchy in Classical Bourgeois Political Theory,"
Rad. Hist. Rev., No. 4 (I977), 36-59, and for a somewhat different viewpoint,
Folbre, "Logic of PatriarchalCapitalism."