From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers

by Allan Kulikoff

With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society.

Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, American History

500 pages, Paperback

First published November 13, 2000

Reviews

[Matthias]

This Brenner-inflected social history of colonial America begins and ends with disasters. At the opening, the enclosure of the commons, and the rolling apocalypse of social disorder that followed it: village communities based around family and village ties found themselves with kicked-out surplus population, leading new and shocking forms of gender relations, employment, and (most immediately) bands of desperate young men "tramping" about. At the end, the American revolution, experienced here as almost a natural disaster, suddenly less able-bodied young men on the farms and everyone requisitioning what they could and intiating cycles of score-settling - a representation of the American Revolution as in line with the usual horrors of civil wars.

In between these two disasters that helped birth the modern liberal order, we see mostly settlers busy building an agrarian, republican, racial one. People are in surplus in England until about Cromwell, and land is surplus in America as long as you're willing to go to war with the people already there, so out of the enclosures-era tramping masses tramp many newly minted Americans. Some people came because they personally had been made desperate, though the relatively better-off Puritans left the social disorder because they wanted to flee the violence, incipient sexual revolution, and generally perceived decline in morality following the destruction of the traditional villages system - in New England they attempted to plant some idealized fascimile of what had been destroyed in the old. In the Chesapeake, more mercenary motives animated settlement, and enslaved Africans steadily formed an increasing part of the workforce. Kulkoff doesn't get into any of the historiographical debates on the religious disputes of the first or the genesis of racialized conceptions of slavery in the latter, but in both he emphasizes the role of a kind of normative patriarchy of precisely the kind that had been idealized but disrupted in England - that of a farm that is a self-sufficient unit headed by a single male head, who benevolently provides for and directs the labor of wife, children, and servants. These male household heads sought to achieve a "competency," or sufficient amount of land to head such a household themselves, for their sons, and (presumably) marriage to a competent-in-this-sense man for their daughters. But the ability to achieve this was always limited from the East by market dependence for certain necessaries, and from the West by Indians who insisted that the land they had lived on belonged to them. These, the dynamics of emigration, fertility, plague, and other sundry demographic matters determined how much this ideal could be achieved, but attempts to establish feudalism were never successful (unless you count plantation slavery as a sort of manorial system - another debate he doesn't get into) and thus new ideals of racial republicanism, founded on older ideals of patriarchy, formed long before Andrew Jackson.

Reading this shortly after Turchin's Ages of Discord seems to lend support, if not to the latter's whole model, at least the idea that population pressures are really really important for thinking about economics, political violence, and how people get along generally. Perhaps stated that broadly it's a bit trivial. But it seems there's something worth thinking about between Turchin's Structural-Demographic model and the Brennerite Political Marxist one; specifically, both are intersested in periods of excess labor as regime transitions (albeit a cyclical one between typically pretty similar regimes in the former, and a one-time transition from political to economic domination in the latter.) Thus, endogenous growth factor imbalance lead to the adoption of wage labor amid increasing social unrest both in early 1600s England and mid-1800s USA, culminating in bloody and only partially successful bourgeois revolutions. But n=2 isn't a very good study - this is still a bong rip kind of thought, one that implies I should read some of Turchin's stuff on premodern such cycles and Political Marxist accounts of other places as well. (Feel free to give me recommendations?)

[Katie Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most comprehensive look at the founding of British North America. Perfect mix of Grounded Histories with Atlantic History.