by Steven Stoll
In the happy version advanced by Adams, and every political economist at the time, the final stage brings expanding wealth. Fed by farmers, cities surge in population. Occupations multiply and subdivide. No resident of the town produces her entire existence. She consumes the product of everyone else’s labor, exchanged through money. For those who told the story, the argument did not need proving. The commercial streets of Glasgow, London, and New York City displayed a proliferating division of labor: ironsmiths, mechanics, druggists, glassblowers, general merchants, grocers, coopers, leather cutters, shoemakers, stonemasons. The Scottish theorists declared the attainment of this form of social organization a world-historical event. And with that, the fable ends. No other stages follow. History continues as quantitative, not qualitative, change: more transactions, greater efficiency, rising wealth, and the geographical expansion of the division of labor itself.
As simple as a child’s bedtime story, and lacking any evidence to support it, the theory of stages nonetheless served as the commonplace representation of material progress for centuries, exerting enormous influence over how elites in the Atlantic World thought about history, political economy, and race. It is the basic historical assumption in the thought of Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, who gave it credit as the first attempt “to give the writing of history a materialistic basis.” And think of one of the most popular novels of all time, Robinson Crusoe, endlessly cited as a work of social science after its publication in 1719, in which Crusoe, marooned on an island off the coast of Africa for twenty-eight years, recapitulates all the stages of material progress. He evolves from a screaming savage on a desolate beach, to a wandering herdsman, to a prosperous farmer. He finally presides like William of Orange over a tiny civil society, in which his three subjects enjoy the freedom of religious conscience.
The theory infused the writings of innumerable American thinkers, especially Benjamin Rush, the political economist Henry Carey, and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose “Frontier Thesis” merely recast the same stages as a pageant of American expansion. “Stand at Cumberland gap,” Turner asserted, “and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file.” Economists have clung to it. W. W. Rostow enshrined it in his Stages of Economic Growth (1960). More recently, Jeffrey Sachs has argued that the purpose of development is to move the billion or so residents of the world’s villages from “subsistence farming” to the next “stage,” in which people live by the market and stop growing their own food.6
Thinking in terms of stages not only structured the way the Atlantic elite saw the world, it gave them a tool for intervening in societies. The purity of the stages, their lack of historical specificity, allowed them to be projected onto any people. The result has been a muddle. “The fundamental error of ahistorical social science,” according to the theorist of world systems Immanuel Wallerstein, “is to reify parts of the totality … and then to compare these reified structures.” In other words, intellectuals began with a mistaken history of their own societies, subdivided this narrative into stages, and then universalized the stages. They judged the people they colonized as “stuck” in this or that stage and called the whole wreck social science. Michel-Rolph Trouillot captures the mentality: “As soon as one draws a single line that ties past, present, and future, and yet insists on their distinctiveness, one must inevitably place actors along that line, either ahead or behind.” Placing these actors meant sorting out all the peoples of the world into one or another of the stages, resulting in the simpleminded and manifestly false distinctions that Toynbee made about Appalachians. Never has there been a model of reality so utterly divorced from reality.7
The consequences of these ideas for people supposedly “behind” cannot be overstated. An “advanced” society can justify moving a “backward” one along the line connecting past and present. Extraction becomes progress. Taxation becomes training in civilization. Disaster (or “shock”) becomes an opportunity for change. Dispossession becomes integration. Stage theory makes it possible to recast taking something away from people as giving them something they never asked for. Most spectacular of all, no degree of suffering on the part of the subject group, no death by famine or descent into wretchedness, invalidates the model. The stages function as a self-contained, self-referencing vision. An idea that comes into being without argument or evidence cannot be defeated for lack of them.
But here is the larger point for the fate of smallholders in general and the residents of Appalachia in particular. Farmers occupy an awkward position within the theory of stages. Like hunters and herders, they belong to a stage before modernity, but unlike the others their work remains essential to modernity. The progress of civil society depends on them. Who but farmers raise the wheat and wool that generate commerce, merchant wealth, and population? Hunters and herders offer little or nothing to civil society, but farmers pull the entire enterprise. Beginning in the seventeenth century, some asked if the country people whose fields fed the towns and filled the hulls of trade were equal to the task. Only those farmers who turned out more wheat and wool than they needed could be said to have entered the final stage. As I will argue throughout this book, no people who grew their own food lived without exchanging things. Nonetheless, political economists accused them of refusing to join the great, burgeoning division of labor. The key distinction, they said, between plodding in stagnation and flowing down the torrent of history lay in the complete alienation of the product from the producer. In civil society, people did not live like savages, fulfilling their own needs. They sold everything they made.8
There are two divisions of labor. In the first, or social division, everyone is a buyer and seller of commodities. It’s what we see in the diversity of occupations and businesses on city streets. The second is sometimes called the technical division. It describes workers who sell their daily capacity to hammer and heave in exchange for money. They labor for the benefit of someone else, never owning the commodities they fashion. Adam Smith begins his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) at this juncture. Break the manufacturing of pins into eighteen operations, and the result is many more pins per day, “and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.” Smith sensed the dangers and ambiguities, as well as the promise, of a life spent in the pin factory. Wedging humans into world-changing productivity had moral consequences. Every buyer and seller on Commercial Street receives full value, whether for a haircut, a pound of apples, or a necklace. But a factory worker receives a tiny fraction of the value she creates. In the absence of protective laws, she has no recourse for twelve-hour shifts and starvation wages.9
Even worse, Smith said, the work itself extracts life from the worker in the same proportion that it creates wealth for others. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention … He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.” Smith grossly overstated his case by asserting that such workers lacked the capacity for generosity, tenderness, and courage. But even before ranks of operatives stood before clattering looms, breathing the sooty air of Manchester, he perceived the physical and moral cost of wealth—the contradiction between human degradation and economic progress. “In every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”10
All sorts of writers condemned the division of labor on view in any factory for creating more poverty than wealth. David Williams, a dissentin
g priest, argued that commercial societies imposed despotism different from that of the ancient empires, “in complicated and oppressive forms; by arbitrary inequalities, and by divisions of labor, which degrade the general mass of the community below the condition of brutes.” David Urquhart, an outspoken Scottish diplomat and member of Parliament, once considered himself a disciple of Smith but grew to detest the factory system. “To subdivide a man,” Urquhart wrote in Familiar Words (1855), “is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not.—The subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.” Yet the fracturing seemed to be identical to modernity itself. The view of an American speaker came closer to the majority: “This division of labour is so essential to civilized man, that whenever we abandon it we must return to barbarism.”11
Agriculture appeared to resist both divisions of labor. Farming favored people who could perform many tasks, not one. And because farmers could sustain themselves, they exchanged what they wanted, when they wanted, not because they needed to for survival. As Smith explained, husbandry did not work like other trades. “The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures. It is impossible to separate so entirely, the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer, as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith. The spinner is almost always a distinct person from the weaver; but the ploughman, the harrower, the sower of the seed, and the reaper of the corn, are often the same.” Smith admired farmers, but he also regarded them as inscrutable and problematic. With a new order in the offing, where workshops pointed the way to a kind of production in which everyone depended on everyone else, country people seemed to insist on making their own pins.12
Smith didn’t leave it at that. A brilliant observer of the material world, he had an eye for dichotomy and the dual natures of things. He must have seen cattle chewing their cuds and excreting all day, leading to an insight. If a farmer pays a worker to plant and harvest, resulting in salable products, then does he not also “pay” a cow to perform the labor of filling its udders? The farmer presides over a division of labor after all, for “not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers.” By “productive” Smith meant something very specific. The cattle’s labor could be alienated in the form of commodities that when sold brought the cow into relation with the rest of society as a producer. The implications go deeper, because by defining cattle as part of the division of labor, Smith implicitly defined everything that sustained cattle as monetized workers as well: grasses, soil microbes, worms, even the dew that settled lightly on the clover at dawn. Each performed specific tasks in the making of milk.13 So while the farm might function as an undifferentiated unit in one sense, its various functions resulted in distinct commodities, making it look more like an ecological workshop. Every animal gave (or amounted to) the product of its labor.
The farmstead combined elements of divided and undivided labor, and from where Smith stood it must have looked perplexing. Plowman and harrower were sometimes the same person, sometimes not. He entirely missed the sexual division, in which women and girls turned wool into textiles or preserved foods, while men and boys cut hay and stacked it in barns. Yet the labor of a peasant household served a collective purpose. Smith did not acknowledge collective economic forms—like households, kin groups, guilds, trade unions, benefit societies, and the communal experiments of radical ministers and priests. Instead, he built his argument on the individual as the basic unit of analysis. So instead of parsing the interior world of the peasant family, with its own logic and pooled resources, he subsumed it into a single identity—the farmer.14
Smith’s description of agriculture leaves all kinds of questions unanswered. A farm that turns out wheat, fruit, vegetables, milk, hay, and eggs can sustain a family, but one that grows wheat alone is like a pin factory. Which farm does Smith describe? England had experienced two centuries of enclosure by the time he wrote. With the help of Parliament, lords were extinguishing peasant rights and taking the common lands for themselves. Why didn’t Smith mention this? Did he consider it so obvious to the progress of civil society that he assumed it? No one knows.15
Political economists far more blunt than Smith took up these questions. No writer argued with the same dark brilliance of James Steuart. In 1767, nine years before the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Steuart completed his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, the first comprehensive work of its kind. With an iciness that makes his thought incomparably fascinating, Steuart asserted that the new order did not need the farmer, only the farm. Agriculture forms the basis of wealth and population, he said, “the most essential requisite for the prosperity of a state,” but it can’t be independent. “That would be inverting the order of things, and turning the master into the servant.”16
Steuart thought that country people who managed to exist without turning all their labor into money inverted the order of things. He really hated vinedressers, or a certain hypothetical vinedresser. A vinedresser earned some money by pruning grapevines and tilled his own “spot of ground for subsistence.” Steuart said that the time the vinedresser spent planting his garden produced no commodity for anyone else. But whenever he worked for wages, he proved himself useful. Steuart even believed that only when the vinedresser got paid did he become a member of society, only then did he exist. “Consequently, were it not for his trade, the state would lose nothing, though the vine-dresser and his land were both swallowed up by an earthquake.” Steuart didn’t hesitate to draw out this point. “If we can suppose any person entirely taken up in feeding himself, depending upon no one, and having nobody depending on him, we lose the idea of society.” Our notion of progress, of history, and of people who do not work within the global economy owes much to Steuart. This idea comes back again when we get to Appalachia. When Alexander Hamilton tried to tax the distillers of western Pennsylvania, provoking the Whiskey Rebellion, he had the same idea in mind.
Steuart didn’t believe in evolution toward a final stage, driven by self-interest or some mystical historical force. He saw a scaffolding of power, not just human propensities, beneath the social order. He favored the calculated ejectment of parliamentary enclosure in order to create workers out of peasants, even if that meant that people starved. Remove the vinedresser from his meager spot of ground and he does great things. He converts his worthless puttering into money. Steuart praised manufacturing for the same reason. It promised to “purge the lands of superfluous mouths,” and those “purged off, must begin to gain their whole subsistence at the expense of those who employ them.” By living on money, they finally belonged to society.17
Steuart was not alone in this view. Hunger had its defenders. “When hunger is either felt or feared,” wrote Joseph Townsend, “the desire of obtaining bread will quietly dispose the mind to undergo the greatest hardships, and will sweeten the severest labours … In the progress of society, it will be found, that some must want.” Only by this threat did beast-like peasants put in a day’s work, said Townsend. Patrick Colquhoun blessed poverty as an engine of affluence. Without it, “nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth.” Peasants who became wage earners maintained the logic of household survival. Cheap grain allowed them to stretch wages for weeks. They often quit work until their shillings ran out. William Temple recommended keeping them hungry. “The only way to make them tempered and industrious is to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the necessaries of life.”
The moralizing writer Hannah More praised poverty itself as a great motivator and moral instructor. She condemned Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791 and 1792), especially Paine’s thundering demand that government come to the aid of the poor. More wrote fables about the contentedness of the ind
igent. In one story, a gentleman named Johnson encounters a shepherd and asks if he is hungry. “‘Sir,’ said the shepherd, ‘poverty is a great sharpener of the wits.’” The shepherd goes on to explain that he sends his children to collect the wool torn from browsing sheep clinging to bushes and brambles. They loom these bits into their own socks. “Mr. Johnson lifted up his eyes in silent astonishment, at the shifts which honest poverty can make.” In More’s view, keeping the poor intent on their survival kept them from sin. It made no sense for the rich to relieve this blessed condition. These are some of the ways that political economists construed hunger as improvement and poverty as progress.18
Subsequent theorists attacked peasants and smallholders in the same voice, calling them redundant, lazy, wasteful, isolated, outside the boundaries of civil society, beneath the market, and bystanders to history. Friedrich List argued that hunters and herders made no dent in the earth, employing not a “hundredth part” of their natural advantages. Problem was, said List, certain farmers produced little more. “In the case of a people in a primitive agricultural condition, a large portion of the existing natural resources lies yet unutilized, and man still continues limited to his nearest surroundings.” As List saw it, as long as indolent farmers had rights over the countryside, waterpower languished, minerals remained buried, trees stood in the forest, and rivers flooded the lowlands rather than providing navigation and trade. Indolent peasants held the state and its progress hostage. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot warned that husbandmen could live without other kinds of workers, “but no other workmen can labour, if the husbandman does not provide him wherewith to exist.”19
