Crafting an Alternative to Capitalism

Abstract

Crafting an Alternative to Capitalism Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Edward S. Cooke, Jr. Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii + 295 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, glossary, notes on sources and methods, index. $45.00. Early Americans lived, we increasingly believe, amidst a “consumer revolution.” Efforts to explore consumer behavior in the early modern economy have given the study of material culture, particularly household objects—how they were made, how they were used, their multiple meanings, their ownership and accumulation—new importance, and focused inquiry on the artifact collections at places such as Colonial Williamsburg, the Winterthur Museum, and Historic Deerfield. Concern with the consumer revolution has led, as well, to exciting new work—one thinks of Ann Smart Martin’s studies of ceramics and pewterware, Adrienne Hood’s and Marla R. Miller’s on the clothing trade, and now Edward S. Cooke Jr.’s carefully wrought investigation of joiners, the furniture they made, and the neighbors to whom they sold it. 1 The current exploration of this consumer revolution builds upon a generation of community studies, on material culture studies, and on the work of historical archaeologists. It is Cooke’s greatest strength that he has mastered the literature and investigatory traditions of several fields and used them to his advantage. Cooke’s study unfolds as a comparison between 1760 and 1820 of two southwestern Connecticut towns, Newtown and Woodbury, situated along the Housatonic River. Both were farming communities; neither was particularly prosperous. Hilly terrain and soil of modest fertility meant that most householders made ends meet through a mix of livestock husbandry, grain cultivation, and craft work, and that they relied more on their neighbors than on external markets for what they did not produce themselves. In both towns, handyman carpenters, house carpenters, and furniture builders were a numerous and significant part of the community. Cooke’s concern is to show how the two communities differed in their response to the market (or, as he occasionally states, to capitalism), and to explore the role of furniture makers [End Page 200] as mediators between “traditional household values and modern market forces” (p. 10). Newtown was a “yeoman town.” Its political order was egalitarian; its households were of modest size and sparsely furnished. Farmers seldom produced surpluses for export and craft work supplied local needs. The population was remarkably stable. The town looked inward. In contrast, Woodbury was a “gentry town.” Its founders had been relatively prosperous migrants from Stratford, and their descendants dominated Woodbury politically and economically. There was more commercial livestock farming, more wage labor, more large houses, and wider ownership of more elegant consumer goods than in Newtown. Woodbury’s population was more mobile; its town looked outward, to the less-settled northern reaches of the Housatonic River for which it served as a “gathering point for agricultural surpluses” (p. 85). The difference was, perhaps, more of degree than of kind, yet it was an important difference. Cooke sets out to relate the production of furniture to its consumption in these two similar but contrasting locales. His initial chapters provide the technical vocabulary needed to compare artisanal techniques in the two towns, but they also lay out his central assumptions. The first, which contradicts much of the previous literature, is that rural artisans were every bit as skilled as their contemporary cosmopolitan counterparts, and often, in fact, exercised greater care in making furniture. This assumption is crucial if we are to follow Cooke in attaching great significance to small differences in furniture design. The second is that New England furniture, already the subject of an extensive literature written for collectors and museums, is of interest to historians primarily as a way of understanding a human community. This leads to a third assumption, which links his study to work by James Henretta, Allan Kulikoff, Christopher Clark, and others on the “transition to capitalism” in early New England, that neither the skills nor the furniture of Connecticut joiners were fully market commodities; rather, joiners were part of a social economy, and the work they did was linked to a family tradition and a community of neighbors...