The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North

by Emily Pawley

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, US history and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

Genres: History

312 pages, Hardcover

Published April 6, 2020

Reviews

[Anaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an interesting look at Agricultural Science in Antebellum New York. It was definitely a subject I didn't know much about, but I learned a lot. I found it particularly interesting how decentralized and open Science was to the public. In this book, amateur Scientists abounded, often using techniques modern Scientists would be horrified by. I'll admit as an aspiring Scientist, I was scoffing at a lot of the mentioned pseudoscience such as people pouring their blood on their crops to increase yield. However, it made me think about modern Science and the downfalls of its "professionalism." Modern Science is precise, focused on rules and certain procedures. Science must avoid error at all costs and involves technical terms that most people can't engage with. When I read scientific papers I often have to look up biological terms, even as someone who has studied a lot of biology. For the average person, Science feels very inaccessible. This situation is part of the problem of anti-intellectualism I see in the US today. People constantly doubt Science because they lack the ability to engage with scientific literature and instead depend on the media to interpret Science for them. This leads to movements like Anti-vaxxing and resistance to restrictions with the current pandemic. I get the importance of Scientific papers and their complexity, but part of me wishes I lived in a society much like Antebellum New York, when engaging with new Scientific advancements seemed to be popular and commonplace.

[Jim Gulley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily Pawley argues that “agricultural improvement” was an economic and cultural zeitgeist in the early 19th-century American Northeast and set the stage for the later development of sophisticated agricultural research in land grant colleges and experimental stations. She bases her research on New York State between the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the outbreak of the Civil War.

The book also deals with the historiography of land reform in the country's early development, pitting the Hamiltonian ideal of distributing federal land to raise revenue by offering it at market prices against the Jeffersonian ideal of subsidizing the sale of federal land to promote rapid settlement by middling farmers. The Jeffersonians prevailed in the end, as evidenced by the Homestead Act, which gave away federal land for free.

The book is engaging, well-written, and accessible. It dispels the notion of the yeoman farmer in the antebellum north and examines the capitalistic development of agriculture during the era.

[Ryan Fischer]

Pulls in a lot of different directions - history of science and history of agriculture with a lot of societal context - but it holds together very well.

[Chesney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for a class in graduate school. Very interesting book about New York farming culture - a topic I didn’t think I’d enjoy but am very glad I did. Recommend.