Ramp Hollow
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Karl Marx liked peasants no better. He saw them as set apart from all the action and tumult of the century, the flow of historical change going on around them. “Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.” This is what baffled him about the apparent indifference of French country people to the coup led by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851. It is why he called them politically inert and socially disconnected, “much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” And it explains his mistranslated phrase, “the idiocy of rural life,” in the Communist Manifesto. One scholar finds that the German word is closer to the Greek for idiom or idiosyncratic. It refers to one withdrawn or isolated. As Marx saw it, when it came to the great political events of the times, peasants had no skin in the game. “Small property in land creates a class of barbarians standing halfway outside of society.” Marx denounced enclosure, revealing the starvation and poverty that resulted from it as essential to the beginnings of capitalism. But he also saw it from within his own overdetermined narrative. Only by losing their wherewithal would peasants ever become revolutionary proletarians who would seize the means of production. In this way, Marx didn’t differ from other political economists. His story merely culminated in a different final stage.20
Marx showed that under capitalism, only labor that takes the form of commodities possesses social value. So any people who labor for themselves are outliers yet to be absorbed into capitalism. Just as the Scottish philosophers believed that any savage could travel the distance from backwardness to productivity, development agencies hold the same view. As the World Bank put it in the 1970s, “Development is concerned with the modernization and monetization of rural society and with its transition from traditional isolation to integration with the national economy.” But “traditional isolation” was the invention of the modernizers. They invented isolation as a malady and offered fully monetized commodity production as the cure.
The modernizers spoke a utopian language. Capitalism portrays itself rationally and scientifically, but it is no less utopian than communism in the sense that both permit the suffering they cause in obedience to an ideal. Whereas Soviet communism exposed people to the unbridled power of the state, American capitalism exposes people to the unbridled market. For our purposes, capitalism demands that every form of production result in capital. That has meant the relentless modernization of food and farming. The peasant garden, the village field, the diversified landscape of products and employments, must everywhere become fully monetized, integrated, engineered, and subordinated.21
Political economists had different names for the final stage. By about 1850 they called it capitalism. It did not emerge from an evolutionary process. We cannot find the New York Stock Exchange inchoate the first time our Natufian ancestors corralled a pair of sheep. Capitalism came into being like anything else, from the way people in a certain place at a certain time responded to events. The way back to Appalachia leads through the history of capitalism in Great Britain. The reason is that English lords established the idea and legal procedure of enclosure. We can understand much about what happened in the southern mountains by looking at this first instance. Americans might not think that capitalism on these shores required the seizure of land, but it did.
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THE HISTORY OF the most extraordinary social system ever invented is like an ever-forming algorithmic fractal landscape. Comprehending it requires us to see the grand patterns that emerge from its repeating yet chaotic capillary structures. One reason for a brief history of capitalism is to make the point that it has a history. It cannot be understood as the outcome of evolutionary stages. It did not dwell for millions of years in the human brain like a dormant virus. It is no better a reflection of human nature than any other social construction. Just a few hundred years ago, it didn’t exist. The people of that not-so-distant past were not precapitalists, nor did they live in precapitalist societies, no matter how deeply engaged they might have been in trade or commodity production. These terms presuppose the thing to be explained. There is another reason for going through the turns and events of early capitalism. It reveals that trade, exchange, money, and markets do not account for it. It came from a new set of relationships having to do with the control of land and labor.
All of this has to do with the transformation of nineteenth-century Appalachia, because while conditions there differed in all sorts of ways from seventeenth-century England, capitalism arrived in the southern mountains with many of the same assumptions and replicated many of the same patterns. We can’t really appreciate the similarities or see Appalachia as fully part of an Atlantic and global expansion of capitalism without a brief history of capitalism itself. The theory of stages functioned as its software. Its hardware consisted of woods and fens and villages—the ecological space and human labor that capitalists combined into a new system. But history is not a series of simple causes and effects. Things that seem to come from out of nowhere can change everything in an instant.22
For thousands of years before very recent times, people were rich if they could command large quantities of food. Piers Plowman is a fourteenth-century poem about a peasant by that name. Piers daydreams about “beans and baked apples … by the lapful,” cream and curds, the best brown ale, white bread, and fresh baked meat. The aristocracy and the clergy demonstrated their power any number of ways, but one of the most remarkable was the giving of feasts. They reinforced the obligations that kept them powerful by feeding plowmen like Piers. The archbishop of York celebrated his appointment in 1467 by banqueting perhaps two thousand lords, barons, ladies, bishops, their servants, and other commoners. They ate in shifts, and the menu included thousands of animals—oxen, calves, sheep, deer, pigs, peacocks, pigeons, partridges, and other birds.23
Lords and peasants might have gone on like this for another thousand years. Money would have become more abundant as a means of exchange. Traveling fairs offered opportunities to buy things from far away and sell local crafts for gold and silver. Some merchants became rich from international trade, but they had great trouble finding ways to invest their money at interest. It’s not obvious how the feudal system could have morphed into something else. It did change, but not from within itself. Instead, change arrived on an October day in 1347, and no one welcomed it.
Twelve galleys heavy with trade from Jaffa sailed into the port of Messina. The Genoese crew groaned in the hold, suffering in sickness. At least one staggered onto the wharf. The first Sicilian he greeted received a bacterial infection from a sneeze, a cough, or maybe a fleabite. Three days later, the sailor was dead, along with every Sicilian who had stood close enough to smell his breath. The afflicted buckled with fever and hard, bleeding ulcers—the first European victims of the Black Death. Over the next four years, as many as 50 million people perished from the plague—representing between 30 and 50 percent of all the inhabitants of Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, Syria, and Palestine, as well as parts of Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Azerbaijan. So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell. Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away. “No tears or candles or mourners” ushered off the dead, wrote Giovanni Boccaccio; “in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown toward dead goats.” Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, “stowed tier upon tier like ships’ cargo.”
The dead left entire towns empty, fields unharvested. The social order came apart. People became scarce. One region in southern France did not regain its pre-plague population until the nineteenth century. Marginal places like mountainsides and wetlands, some settled as early as the eleventh century, lost their human presence altogether. Ruined drainage canals on the coast of Lion hummed with malarial mosquitoes
. Wild game, including bears, boars, wolves, and partridges, returned to the upland plateau that borders the Rhône Valley. Sheep filled some of the ecological niches left vacant by the deceased.24
Political turmoil, as well as disease, contributed to the crisis of the old order. English peasants rebelled against another source of misery. In June 1381, Richard II, then fourteen years old, decreed a flat tax that charged the poor the same rate as the rich. Wat Tyler refused to pay it and raised an army of fifty thousand to take London. After crossing London Bridge, they confronted and executed the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord treasurer. The boy-king sent a message to the peasant-rebel. He wanted to talk. Tyler rode into the meeting alone and unarmed. No one knows what he said to Richard, but he might have drawn a dagger. The lord mayor of London ran his sword through Tyler, who bled to death in the street. Richard addressed the insurgents soon after, allegedly yelling, “You shall have no captain but me!” Yet he had also written a series of letters that promised reform and asked the peasants to meet his agents in Kent to work out the details. When eight rebel leaders showed up, royal officers tore up the letters. Then they executed the rebels.25
Richard put down the Peasants’ Revolt, but he couldn’t prevent the collapse of the medieval labor system. The tens of millions dead changed the balance between a few lords and many bondsmen into something more like a smallholder’s Arcadia. There were abundant vacant acres and too few people to cultivate them. Those who survived the demographic implosion challenged the terms of work. Peasants walked away from ruined manors and coerced higher wages and fresh meat from desperate nobles. Food flourished. Married couples could be sure of their own farm with minimal obligations. One lord grumbled about country people, “A short time ago one performed more service than three do now.” Yet this only meant that peasants had gained a modicum of leverage over their material lives. But if Richard’s victory says anything, it is that although feudalism did not survive the Great Mortality, the landed aristocracy did.26
Capitalism emerged out of this enormous crisis. The Black Death should be seen as related to if not identical with the Little Ice Age, the period between 1350 and 1850 when falling temperatures upset long-standing patterns. Outbreaks of plague did not cease after its first visitation. It struck throughout the cold and rainy sixteenth century. In 1575, it killed sixteen thousand people in Milan and one-third of Venice. By then, the disease hit populations weakened by successive harvest failures. A merchant class and some farmers benefited from higher grain prices, but living conditions deteriorated for everyone. In Languedoc, France, people enjoyed relative prosperity (1460–1504), then periodic harvest failure (1504–1526), followed by a decade of famine (1526–1536). Spring rains spoiled the crop of 1527, when bishops commandeered wheat off the highway on its way to the pope. No social system can survive centuries of epidemic, climate volatility, and starvation.27
This is how feudalism died, but in order for capitalism to have been born, a degree of stability needed to return. Science might well have arisen from out of the disorder as a way of finding rational explanations for the triumph of death and chaos over every existing institution. By the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and John Locke had demoted God, revealing that people could calculate the motion of planets with their own minds and organize themselves politically without divinely ordained monarchs. Inventors and improvers drained bogs, rotated crops, and devised new animal breeds. The last famine in England ended in 1624. The last instance of epidemic plague ended in 1666. Better prospects for survival were cause and consequence of intensified exchanges and more circulating money. An infusion of food and other resources from the American colonies changed the horizon, suggesting the possibility of return on investment. The gentry had their own plans. They decided that profit in money would replace the tribute and mutual obligations between vassal and bondsman. Even as the dreary cold lingered over Britain, lords moved to restore the control over laborers they had lost in the demographic disaster and take advantage of commercial opportunities. But doing all or any of these things demanded that they redefine the foundation of the entire social order: land.28
Before the sixteenth century, no one in England owned land, not even Richard II. It existed within a bewildering index of tenures and estates, defining who could use it, what could be done with it, and for how long. It did not slide from hand to hand in the alienable form that we know. It was wrapped and bundled in customary rights that cascaded downward from king to knight to peasant. They all lived off a complex commons. A commons is any set of resources that is used or controlled by a village, town, nation, or some other group. It is a managed environment, with households or individuals possessing specific rights to plow, hunt, or gather. A commons is not free for all but exists under certain rules.29
English peasants and lords each had different kinds of rights to the commons, called tenures. Some of these arrangements (like copyhold) gave peasants something very close to private property. In others (at will), a lord exercised absolute power over how villeins and serfs farmed. Most peasants lived as smallholding tenants who paid a fee in food, labor, or money to the manor. But the real point is that lords and peasants adhered to the customs of the commons. Village associations—not lords themselves—often determined what could be planted and where, even to such minutia as what portion of a certain field would be pasture rather than tillage. These governing bodies made the landscape a collective undertaking. They also made doing anything new with it nearly impossible.30
This is what began to change in the sixteenth century. By then, the British lordly class had lost its military purpose. English knights no longer jousted in armor or bashed their enemies over the head. They also no longer extracted tribute by threatening peasants with violence (though extreme brutality and imprisonment awaited anyone who refused). Instead, peers of the realm lent the use of violence to an increasingly centralized state. The one thing still under lordly control was land. But the demographic shift and their vanished power of coercion left them with only economic means of extracting value. They did not want that value paid to them in quantities of food or days of labor but in money. In attempting to solve these problems and maintain their wealth and power, they created a new social system. Making money by extracting value from land required new techniques, new commodities, and new relationships.31
Enclosure began with wool. Throughout the middle of England, for example, including the counties of Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, food for a rebounding population ran up against the extent of land. Tension emerged between how much area would be allotted to crops like oats and wheat and how much for raising sheep. Peasant and lord alike favored sheep. Wool emerged as the most significant export commodity of late medieval England, a trend that intensified in the following centuries. Along with meat, leather, and tallow, wool required lighter labor and sold for higher prices than grain. But the lords saw a greater potential. They looked past the domestic market to a North Atlantic trade. They knew of experiments in converting fields from grasses like timothy to fodder crops like turnips. This sophisticated husbandry increased the numbers of small livestock that could be sustained in a given space. But no improving lord or tenant farmer could do any of these things as long as common-use rights reigned over the English countryside.32
Enclosure was just what it sounds like. Lords secured the places where peasants had planted, herded, mowed, gathered wood, and hunted, and then literally surrounded them with hawthorn hedges or stone walls. They made claims in local courts and eventually in Parliament in order to create a new and shocking category of land use: private property. It was new because it had never existed before in England or anywhere else. It was shocking because never before had individuals possessed an exclusive right over land. The process of transferring the English countryside into real estate took centuries and reflected regional differences, like the power of lordship and traditions of use. It sometimes proceeded by public agreement (though pro
bably accompanied by private threat). Enclosure’s appearance in any given place often depended on whether arable crops grew in proximity to markets or whether pasturing predominated.33
But wherever the nobility enclosed common fields and pasture, they transformed much more than legal rights and definitions. They turned subdivided strip fields into consolidated sheep walks. They built farmhouses and elaborate mansions where none had been before. Old tracks and paths vanished. They amalgamated the peasant world from a mosaic of assorted shapes into much larger pieces made of corners and straight lines. Said the Board of Agriculture, “The first great benefit resulting from an enclosure is contiguity.” The more square, the better.34
The English common lands also consisted of fens, marshes, and other marginal environments known as wastes. Lords created real estate when they ordered these wetlands drained, though nearby villages had engaged in peat and hay gathering for centuries. If the enclosing gentry had only seized active fields, they might have left peasant livelihood intact. But the agrarian economy depended less on fields than one might think. It was not where peasants planted grains but where they gathered mushrooms, which mattered more to them. One-third of the peasantry (in one sample) farmed fewer than five acres. Another third lived on more than five but fewer than nineteen. Households with only a little ground in garden or tillage survived by externalizing the greater portion of their needs to the wider landscape. They found the core of the makeshift economy in such places—fuel and lumber, grasses for animal, roots, mushrooms, nuts, fish, berries, game for hunting, and medicinal herbs. Livestock fattened in marshes and woods cost nothing yet produced milk and meat and other marketable commodities. We will return to this idea.35