The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860

by Christopher Clark

Between the late colonial period and the Civil War, the countryside of the American northeast was largely transformed. Rural New England changed from a society of independent farmers relatively isolated from international markets into a capitalist economy closely linked to the national market, an economy in which much farming and manufacturing output was produced by wage labor. Using the Connecticut Valley as an example, The Roots of Rural Capitalism demonstrates how this important change came about. Christopher Clark joins the active debate on the "transition to capitalism" with a fresh interpretation that integrates the insights of previous studies with the results of his detailed research. Largely rejecting the assumption of recent scholars that economic change can be explained principally in terms of markets, he constructs a broader social history of the rural economy and traces the complex interactions of social structure, household strategies, gender relations, and cultural values that propelled the countryside from one economic system to another. Above all, he shows that people of rural Massachusetts were not passive victims of changes forced upon them, but actively created a new economic world as they tried to secure their livelihoods under changing demographic and economic circumstances. The emergence of rural capitalism, Clark maintains, was not the result of a single "transition"; rather, it was an accretion of new institutions and practices that occurred over two generations, and in two broad chronological phases. It is his singular contribution to demonstrate the coexistence of a family-based household economy (persisting well into the nineteenth century) and the market-oriented system of production and exchange that is generally held to have emerged full-blown by the eighteenth century. He is adept at describing the clash of values sustaining both economies, and the ways in which the rural household-based economy, through a process he calls "involution," ultimately gave way to a new order. His analysis of the distinctive role of rural women in this transition constitutes a strong new element in the study of gender as a factor in the economic, social, and cultural shifts of the period. Sophisticated in argument and engaging in presentation, this book will be recognized as a major contribution to the history of capitalism and society in nineteenth-century America.

Genres: History, American History, The United States Of America, Economics

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dry read, but it’s a 19th century economic history? Clark embeds a really sound argument against the idea that the “market” was the only social system which forced rural America into an emergent and oppressive capitalism. Notably, he brings in gender and household economics, while always relying on really, really good primary source people, places, locations. Census and newspaper data, all over the place. If you’re doing research on the Connecticut River Valley in the late 18th-late 19th centuries, this text is seminal, imo. One tiny thing: his involvement of a gendered social reproduction is a Marxist feminist idea, so it might have been nice to see a reference to Rosa Luxemburg, and even though they’re 20th century thinkers, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, and others.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that this would be a terrible read, Economic history is pretty much the bane of my existence, and thus I let it slide until I only had time to grad school read it, and of course, it's fantastic. It's more social/local history than economic and is far from dull. I want to re-read this one at the end of the semester, it definitely warrants a thorough reading.

[Jake Pacigena · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're familiar with Jonathan Prude's book "The Coming of Industrial Order," also centered around a particular region of antebellum Massachusetts, you'll be in familiar territory for picking up The Roots of Rural Capitalism.

One of the strongest takeaways from this work, which I did not pick up from Prude's, is that farmers and rural folk were not passive victims to capitalist or urban exploitation. Rural folk, and not just stock jobbers or land speculators, contributed to the formation of a distinctly market-oriented system of economic exchange. Clark's work is replete with a analysis broken down into stages from the Revolution to the Civil War, and demonstrates patterns of change that are easy to follow and understand. This work is in conformity with a point taken from McCoy's "The Elusive Republic" on the Jeffersonian period: market expansion was a process accelerated by the everyday farmer, artisan, and migrant, rather than stimulated solely through a top-down process of oppression.

One of the recurring questions in this kind of scholarship is how do we define capitalism? In this work, which uses the concept in the title, the answer is, I believe, somewhat defective. Myself and others tend to make a distinction between market and capitalism. I find that Clark conflates the two while uses the latter term almost exclusively. Is a farmer utilizing almost exclusively cash to deliver a variety of products to local and global markets a capitalist? But what about his grandfather who bartered with a regional merchant to "sell" surplus wheat downstream to a Connecticut port in exchange for spices or salt? Both farmers aren't pursuing wealth accumulation for its own sake, but have gradually become more dependent on market forces, and accrue wealth or property usually to provide for their offspring's future. Clark demonstrates the change in market dependency for everyday farmers and laborers, a process that is illuminated when we consider the pressures general store merchants were under, especially before the omnipresence of cash in American economic exchange. The conclusions are sound, I just have a small gripe with how we choose to define the "problem", is it market or capitalism (or are they synonymous)? The question is on-going and beyond my amateur historical knowledge.

Clark's work contributes to the rich scholarship surrounding change in antebellum New England. It is filled with intimate everyday details while simultaneously providing insightful analysis regarding economic and social change, probing at the fringes religion, feminism, labor, and other fields of study that may be of interest to the reader.

[AskHistorians]

An influential study of the early origins of the "market revolution" and industrialization in the North.