Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860

Abstract

Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in Hudson Valley, 1780-1860. By Martin Breugel. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. 352. Illustrations, tables, maps, figures. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $21.95.) Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors: The Transformation of Rural Society in Hudson River Valley, 1720-1850. By Thomas S. Wermuth. (Ithaca: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. 192. Illustrations, tables. Cloth, $54.50; paper, $17.95.) Together, Martin Breugel's and Thomas S. Wermuth's studies of Hudson River Valley add significantly to our understanding of northern small farmers in early republic. Their subjects' proximity in time and space-Ulster County in Wermuth's case, and adjacent Columbia and Greene Counties in Breugel's-also provide an opportunity to compare historical approaches to understanding a small region of America's rural hinterlands over many generations. Focused less at township level than most previous northern studies of farmers and storekeepers, these books investigate family farm and storekeeping strategies and emerging relations of residents over a somewhat wider area, as well as their river traffic to New York City some sixty to eighty miles away. Both studies self-consciously retreat from interpretations of northern countryside in this era, which stem from a classical economic picture of a timeless, unchanging in which anonymous agents purposefully calibrate their activities on (Breugel, 7). Breugel also takes a firm stand against scholars who posited a liberal kind of entrepreneurial competition (7) between great landowners and tenants in Hudson Valley. Although many mechanisms of a economy can be glimpsed in New York hinterlands, neither author argues for a thoroughgoing market revolution or transition to capitalism in this era. Yet both also discover that farmers actively produced surpluses for sale in beyond local family and networks, used cash in rural transactions that signaled integration with capitalist mechanisms of and external trade, and introduced labor in which farmers either received or paid wages. Breugel's chapters trace how concepts such as capital and markets denoted material goods and places early in nineteenth century, but became increasingly distanced from face-to-face relationships as they took on abstract qualities. After 1820s, for example, punctuality and timeliness ... were disconnected from natural rhythms (3). But if Breugel and Wermuth share many methodological concerns about interpretation of rural change, proximity of their subjects in time and place heightens our ability to see important differences in their approaches to competing community or interpretation that dominates in other scholarship about era. Wermuth's painstaking reconstruction of a few storekeepers' account books and local probate inventories provides bedrock of his look at Ulster County's rural economic relations; he creatively manipulates these typically recalcitrant and scanty source materials to demonstrate activities of a few key individuals. Also to his credit, Wermuth devotes almost half his study to prerevolutionary period, when the bonds of mutuality and reciprocity (7), regulation of prices and wages, and production for consumption prevailed in this county of mainly freeholders (6). The force of tradition (35), not contests of interest groups, established local exchange relations. And though not self-sufficient householders, Ulster County residents produced within their locale most of things they exchanged even to end of eighteenth century. According to Wermuth, American Revolution strengthened local social and economic institutions that had structured life for generations; it resurrected traditional economic ideas demanding authorities enforce customary controls and regulate prices of necessary items (69). …