''A Great Machine'' or a ''Beast of Prey'': A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in an Age of Capitalist Transformation

Abstract

In the 1820s and 30s, the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company (MHLIC), established by the Boston elite to administer family trusts, invested in mortgage loans to farmers from western Massachusetts. Those aspects of Company mortgages that marked them as modern debtor-creditor arrangements\-\-formal procedures, written contracts, and above all, the necessity of punctual payments, enforced by the threat of lawsuits\-\- frightened and alienated many borrowers and fueled broader-based political protests against corporations. Rural discontent over the Company's business practices occurred as farmers underwent the difficult transition from a household to a market economy, but the Company's insistence on those practices represent the Boston elite's own adjustment to a new era of corporate capitalism. Conducting business with novel sorts of economic actors, no longer fellow merchants but distant strangers and social inferiors, elite Bostonians positioned the Company as an impersonal mechanism, irrevocably fixed in its method of operation, against what it perceived as an unreliable and assertive yeomanry. Rule-bound regularity soon emerged as not only standard business procedure but a full-blown ideological vision of a clockwork universe of business. Implying both the impartial application of rules and predictability in the business world, this vision held political and cultural appeal in an age of novel social tensions and unprecedented economic instability. Exploring the vexed relations between Massachusetts farmers and the MHLIC thus illuminates the process whereby the practices and values associated with corporate capitalism took hold among yeomen farmers and elite Bostonians alike.