The Countryside In The Age Of Capitalist Transformation

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."

This book moves rural history into explorations of modern politics: diverse rural peoples and their complex relationships to the American state in the twentieth century.

This book synthesizes Marxian theory with the existing historical literature to produce a new analysis of the origins of capitalism in the US and the social roots of the US Civil War.

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.

Introduction: crisis of certainty -- Cotton guesses -- The daily "probabilities"--Weather prophecies -- Economies of the future -- Promises of love and money -- Epilogue: specters of uncertainty

This book argues that schools were a driving force in the formation of social, political, and financial capital during the market revolution and capitalist transition of the early republican era. Grounded in an intensive study of schooling in the Genesee Valley region of upstate New York, it traces early sources of funding and support for education (including common schools and various forms of higher schooling) to their roots in different social and economic networks and trade and credit relations. It then interprets that story in the context of other major developments in early American social, political, and economic history, such as the shift from agricultural to non-agricultural production, the integration of rural economies into translocal capitalist markets, the organization of the Second Great Awakening, the transformation of patriarchy, the expansion of white male suffrage, the emergence of the Secondary American Party System, and the formation of the modern liberal state.