by Steven Stoll
35. Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 18–19; Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, 64–66. Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 149.
36. The fields were known as Hooknorton and Southrop. “Petition of the Owners and Proprietors of … Hooknorton and Southrop,” Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 34, 65. John Locke aided the lords by elevating greed to principle. He managed to turn an argument about the God-given earth into one for enclosing. According to Locke, since land in private hands produced more of everything, everyone benefited, even those without land.
37. Winstanley, A DECLARATION FROM THE Poor oppressed People OF ENGLAND; Kennedy, Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism, 107; Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, 150, 155, 204; documents relating to the Newton rebellion may be found here: www.newtonrebels.org.uk/rebels/history.htm. On Locke, see Second Treatise of Government, chap. 4.
38. Wolf, Europe and the Peoples Without History, 77. Wood, Origin of Capitalism, 96. Price summed up the effect: “Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings.” Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, quoted in Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 888. Also see Marx, Grundrisse, 505–507, and Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 14.
39. Thomas More published Utopia in 1516, writing that sheep “may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” More, Utopia, 16. Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, 50–54.
40. Goldsmith, The Deserted Village. Mavis Batey reconstructed the village’s location and gives wonderful detail in “Nuneham Courtenay: An Oxfordshire 18th Century Deserted Village.” Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 284–88. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 88–89.
41. Statistics for the previous paragraph from Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, 77; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 317–19; Fogel, Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 10–12; and Perelman, Invention of Capitalism. Intellectuals asked how poverty could continue amid wealth. Bentham, Burke, Malthus, James Mill, J. S. Mill, Owen, Ricardo, Senior, and Marx, as well as hundreds of lesser writers, recognized that by tearing down traditional customs and social norms, capitalism challenged centuries of received wisdom about the survival of human communities. On the poor laws and enclosure, see Wrightson’s Earthly Necessities, 215–20. Wrightson explains that the poor laws came about for more than one reason, among them food crises that afflicted England before the last famine in 1624 but also to aid “labouring persons not able to live off their labour.” Also see Appleby, Economic Thought, 162–64. On enclosure as a revolution, see Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 255. Young quoted in Williams, The Country and the City, 67.
42. Hydén, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania, 16; Hydén, No Shortcuts to Progress, 7.
43. Estates became both capital and ecological base, money and legacy. As Gudeman puts it, “The European estate and the hacienda may be exchanged for cash only at the expense of losing the patrimony, of severing the continuity of a community.” Gudeman, Anthropology of Economy, 33.
44. Stead, “Mobility of English Tenant Farmers,” 173–89. The tripartite system of lords, tenants, and laborers is simplified and exaggerated. The subject of fluctuating rents and the antipathy between tenants and landowners is the central relationship in Brenner’s “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe.” Historians of early modern Britain take every possible exception to Brenner’s conclusions. Most ignore him altogether. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 74, 134–35, 186.
45. This is the circuit or pathway of capital. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 247.
46. Chattel applied to slaves dates to 1649 when Milton referred to slaves owned by a king. The Oxford English Dictionary implies that the term was meant rhetorically or perhaps as a metaphor to point out the irony and injustice of owning a person.
47. Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, 21, 232–34, 428–30; Oxford English Dictionary; Smith, Wealth of Nations, 353–55.
48. For this and the previous paragraphs, see Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 623, and Wheels of Commerce, 21, 230, 428–30. For an analysis of this idea, see Wallerstein, “Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down,” in Unthinking Social Science, 207–17.
49. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 136. By autonomy I do not mean independence from all relationships and institutions of power. I mean a sufficient material wherewithal to choose whether to earn wages or not. Autonomy, as I mean it, is freedom from the direct control of capital, not necessarily political autonomy from states or state power, though it can mean that too.
50. There are all sorts of distinctions implied here. Medievalists claim a highly specific definition for peasant, but a peasant can be any country person. Smallholder often refers to an intensive form of agriculture, in which a household owns its land. Netting would not use the term to describe mountain farmers in West Virginia who made extensive use of the forest. I will use the term to describe them nonetheless. On peasants, see Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 3–6. Chinampas are fields or garden plots constructed within a shallow lake. They are made by layering mud, silt, and composted organic matter until the structures rise above water level. Aztec farmers invented the chinampa in the twelfth century.
51. Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 59, 240–43; Shanin, “The Peasantry as a Political Factor,” 8–9; Attwood, Raising Cane, 17. My use of the household does not open up all the conflict and tension that existed within families. I prefer to regard the household as an economic unit. See Sachs, Home Rule, 147.
52. For a discussion of subsistence and some of its meanings, see Trouillot, Peasants and Capital, 155–57. For more on surplus and poverty, see Mayer, Articulated Peasant, 321.
53. Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 270, 329–30.
54. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, 13; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 200.
55. Criticism of Chayanov is abundant. He described a certain peasantry at a certain time. He was right in some essential ways, but peasants have been known to break some of his rules. Chayanov, On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems, 7. I have also benefited from Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, passim; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 51–55; Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 1–13; Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm; Mayer, The Articulated Peasant; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant; Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate. Industrial agriculture functions on entirely different assumptions. Its key metric is labor efficiency.
56. Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 130–33. The ratio takes all energy into consideration, the calories expended by animals and humans, the diesel fuel in the tractor and the electricity used to manufacture fertilizers. There are some problems with these numbers. For one thing, the pull power of oxen and fossil fuels are commensurate only in the sense that both can be converted into the same units. They have entirely different origins. And while a harvesting and threshing machine is made for one specific crop (wheat or corn), oxen apply their energy to lots of possible products and tasks. It would make more sense to ask the energy budget of the entire peasant farm. If rice demands more energy than the rice contains, something growing in another field might make up for it. It is also true that gasoline and diesel engines are increasingly efficient. Nonetheless, this is a useful measure. Also see Pimentel, “Energy Inputs in Food Crop Production in Developing and Developed Nations.”
57. Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 9, 107–108; Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, passim.
58. Colman, The Agriculture and Rural Economy of France, 8, 296; Candler, Brief Notices of Hayti, 38, 143–44.
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p; 59. Steuart, Principles of Political Economy, chap. 28. Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 10–15, 270, 298, 329–30. Among historians of Appalachia who understand these distinctions, Lewis writes, “a common misconception that has skewed the interpretation of the region’s history is that subsistence and market are dichotomous, antagonistic forms of economic relations,” Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 23, and “Self-sufficiency was not inconsistent with production for exchange, and most farmers engaged in both modes of production,” “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity,” 26. Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, chap. 1. Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy, 48–49, 92. Chayanov hated the idea of romanticizing or idealizing peasants. “No peasant would refuse either a good roast beef, or a gramophone, or even a block of Shell Oil Company shares.” Daniel Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” in Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy, xv-xix; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 86–87; Netting, Smallholders, Householders, 318–20; Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth, 63. Kulikoff writes of North America, “Yeomen … participated in commodity markets with regularity—but only to sustain noncommercial neighborhood networks.” Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 36. Chevalier, “There Is Nothing Simple About Simple Commodity Production,” 118.
60. Mayer, The Articulated Peasant, 45, 218–19. On separate “accounts,” Gudeman writes of the Kekchi Maya of southern Belize, “Even when a man has an important source of cash income through trade or market cropping, he raises corn for the house.” Gudeman, Anthropology of Economy, 27, 44, and The Demise of a Rural Economy, 33. On articulation theory, see Dore, Myths of Modernity, 20.
61. Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate, 169–80; Dove, “Hybrid Histories and Indigenous Knowledge Among Asian Rubber Smallholders,” 349–59; Dove, “Rice-Eating Rubber and People-Eating Governments,” 33–63.
62. Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate, 6. Of all the innovations of the smallholders, writes Dove, the most important “may have been the development of a mechanism for rationalising the combination of market-oriented cash-cropping and subsistence-oriented food production.” Hydén, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania, 4. Also Gudeman, The Demise of a Rural Economy, 33, and Waters, The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture.
63. See Gudeman, The Demise of a Rural Economy, 130.
64. Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilderness,” published in Memoirs, Letters, and Remains, 159. Michael Merrill was the first to break through the “this or that” duality that still plagues the way most Americans think about noncapitalist modes of production. I owe a great debt to Merrill’s “Cash Is Good to Eat,” 42–71. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III.
65. The number of emigrants is estimated to have been thirteen to twenty thousand. Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 40–41, 53–59, 65. Shepard, God’s Plot, 57.
66. On ghost acres, see Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 275.
67. Richards, Unending Frontier, 1–5; Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 110.
68. On the dispossession of the Acadians and the quotation, see Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme, 333.
69. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 15; Donahue, The Great Meadow, 102, 166, 209.
70. This and the previous paragraph are based on Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order, and Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism.
71. On the transition to capitalism in New England, I benefited from Henretta, Origins of American Capitalism, chaps. 6 and 7; Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism; Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism; Merrill, “The Anti-Capitalist Origins of the United States”; Agnew, “The Threshold of Exchange,” 115; Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order.
72. Donahue, The Great Meadow, 102, 166, 209. The Great Meadow was not a common after 1653. But even after the town divided it into private property, it retained many elements of common management. Richard Judd’s Common Lands, Common People is about the continued management of the ecological base in northern New England.
73. See Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause, 208; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 176; Letter to John Taylor, May 1, 1794, and letter to Benjamin Hawkins, February 18, 1819, both in the Thomas Jefferson Papers (www.loc.gov/collections/thomas-jefferson-papers/about-this-collection/). Robin Blackburn notes that slavery became rooted in the Louisiana country for many reasons, but Jefferson’s silence on the question was among them. “Jefferson was the only man who could have prevented that outcome.” Quoted in Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause, 81. For Jefferson’s hope for the diminution of slavery and the settlement of the Mississippi near New Orleans, see Rothman, Slave Country.
74. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter II, quoted in American Georgics, 17. The letters appeared first in London and then in Philadelphia in 1793. The parenthetical quotation two paragraphs down comes from Letter III.
75. Agrarian thought among whites does not have an impressive record of insisting upon the equal rights of African-Americans. For an example of abolitionist argument wrapped in an implicitly racist free-soil philosophy, see Julian, “Speech Before Congress on the Homestead Bill,” in Speeches on Political Questions, 52. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter IX, in American Georgics, 26.
76. On slave gardens, one traveler observed: “But the number that are permitted to labor at all for such purposes [their own gardens] is very small … the great object of the master is to derive the greatest possible profit, at the least possible expense, provided that he does not endanger the life, and health, and value of his slaves.” Parsons, Inside View of Slavery, 155. And see Schlotterbeck, “The Internal Economy of Slavery in Rural Piedmont Virginia,” 173; Westmacott, African-American Gardens and Yards, 90; and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 154. On black agrarianism, see Smith, “Black Agrarianism and the Foundations of Black Environmental Thought,” and the following sources quoted therein: “Narrative of Williams Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave”; Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup”; “The Life of Josiah Henson”; and Frederick Douglass, “An Address to the Colored People of the United States.” David Omowalé Franklyn captures the sense of a fugitive existence in the Caribbean. Franklyn, “Grenada, Naipaul, and Ground Provision,” 70–71.
77. King, The Great South, 274. The best discussion that I have seen of post-emancipation land policies and attempts to recapture black labor is Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 30–35.
78. Julian, “Speech on the Homestead Bill,” American Georgics, 90–95. Popular sovereignty had been written into the Compromise of 1850. Residents of Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory were to decide themselves if slavery would be allowed.
79. Flagg, “Agricultural Progress,” American Georgics, 82.
80. Jordan and Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier, 38–58. See Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States, vol. 1, 122.
81. For this and the previous paragraph, see Van Ruyvan, “Appendix 5. Received 28 January, 1656. Secret,” Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 5, 248–49; “Deduction of Clear and Precise Account of the Condition of the South River … Received 28 January 1656,” Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 5, 236. Outrages committed by the Swedes went back to 1646. Also see Sachs, Home Rule, 104.
3. The Rye Rebellion
1. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 475.
2. Washington quoted in Cayton, Frontier Republic, 7; Lear quoted in Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 30, 190; Bouton, “A Road Closed,” 855.
3. White, The Backcountry and the City, 2. Slaughter refers to the Rebellion as “frontier epilogue” in Whiskey Rebellion. Here is an example of how two historians writing in 1967 dismissed the Rebellion: “The Whiskey Rebellion was an early, violent expression of the unease, discontent, and rebellious spirit which disturbed the American scene for two decades before the War of 1812 brought the natio
n relief from internal tensions.” Hyneman and Carey, eds., A Second Federalist, 282. Agrarian insurrection continued beyond 1800, including the New York Anti-Rent War of the 1830s and the Farmers’ Alliance of the 1870s–1890s. See Catherine M. Stock, Rural Radicals, and Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom.
4. Nevins and Commager, A Short History of the United States, 151, 156; White, The Backcountry and the City, 2, 210; Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 255.
5. My argument owes a debt to Cayton, who writes, “The Federalists wanted to fully integrate the Ohio Country into the Atlantic cultural and commercial community … they sought interdependence not independence.” Frontier Republic, 21. I saw Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (“Critique of Critical Investigation,” “3. Totality and Totalisation”) quoted by White in Backcountry and the City, 31. The other word for identifying people with labels and collective identities is seriality. Jefferson and Hamilton had a disagreement about this. They both believed in seriality, but Jefferson’s was unbound (meaning looser identities like American or settler) while Hamilton’s was more bound (defined and numerated, like tax rolls and the census).
