Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Colonial British North America: The Place of the American Revolution in the Origins of US Capitalism

Abstract

Social and economic historians have debated whether the rapid growth of agricultural and industrial commodity production in the United States was a continuation of or a radical break with the economic and social patterns of British colonial North America. At issue is whether the social and economic preconditions for capitalist industrialization existed before, or emerged only after the American Revolution and the establishment of an independent US state. The two major interpretive models – the ‘staples/commercialization’ and ‘frontier/demographic’ models – provide insights into the process of economic development in colonial North America. However, their inability to root their analyses in specificities of different forms of social labour leave them inadequate. This essay attempts to root the patterns of economic growth and development in the dynamics and transformation and preservation during the American Revolution of different social property relations (independent household production, petty‐commodity production, plantation slavery) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.