Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 by Daniel Vickers

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 353 gan. He is completing a book entitled Quarantine!Epidemics, Immigrants and the Social Layers of Separation in Gilded-Age New York for Johns Hopkins University Press. Farmers andFishermen: Two Centuries ofWork in Essex County, Massachu­ setts, 1630-1850. By Daniel Vickers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. xxii+347; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, index. $45.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Daniel Vickers’s fine, detailed study of the transformation offarm­ ing and fishing in Essex County, Massachusetts, over the course of two centuries will be of special interest to labor historians and con­ noisseurs of community studies. An immense amount of work went into this book—Vickers began his research sixteen years ago—yet Farmers and Fishermen never loses sight of the single question around which it is constructed: “Who worked for whom and under what terms?” (p. 9). Vickers’s answers to this question in its various socioeconomic guises in the end provide the reader with a convincing and artfully reasoned explanation as to why specific labor arrangements were adopted by Essex County fishermen and farmers. Over the course of two hundred years, roughlyfrom 1630 to 1850, as these arrangements changed with growth in the labor supply and the development of a more market-driven economy, the frontier economy ofEssex County came to resemble that of a more mature society. The altered condi­ tions in labor relations then helped bring into existence a working class that could be utilized in the industrialization of Essex County. The first half of this study “examines the scarcity of labor and capital within the rural and maritime economies of Essex County’ ’ (p. 6) and explains how farmers and fishing merchants responded to these scarcities. Although they adopted different economic strate­ gies, each group tried to reproduce in New England familiar rural models from home. Since conditions in England—an abundance of people and productive wealth—were the opposite of what greeted colonists in Massachusetts, settlers were forced to make adjustments in the “traditions of rural economy that they brought with them from the mother country” (p. 32). Farmers developed a system of family labor governed by “crossgenerational interdependence” (p. 83). Sons worked for their fa­ thers, in some cases beginning as early as the age offive, and contin­ ued to work on the farm until they were married, usually in their early twenties, or were old enough to be given a small patrimony. Productive relations in the fishing industry took the form of a client­ age system in which poor fishermen were forced to deliver their en­ tire catch to a single merchant in exchange for the goods—boat, equipment, and provisions—that enabled them to ply the sea. In one respect, however, productive relations in both trades were simi­ 354 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE lar: farmers as well as merchants and fishermen combined to form “tight though unequal relations of interdependence” (p. 86). The second half of the book details the history of Essex County’s “socioeconomic maturation” (p. 7). In the 18th century, when land resources began to diminish and there was less work to do on the family farm, farmers moved away from the “frontier principle of strict-interdependence” (p. 229). Sons began to work off the farm, for neighbors, launching “a thin local market in the labor of young men” (p. 237). In the fishery, the system of clientage gave way to a more adversarial, less paternal system characterized by much harsher relations between capital and labor. Like the farmers, fish­ ermen found themselves driven more and more into regular paid employment, what Vickers calls the “marketplace oflabor” (p. 167). In this way, Vickers carefully traces the gradual transformation of independent workers into a class of people whose defining condi­ tion was “proletarian dependency” (p. 323). Farmers and Fishermen is an original and significant addition to the literature on economic development in Puritan New England. Vick­ ers is almost mathematical in the precision and logic of his argu­ ment, yet the book is never boring. He writes very well—his descrip­ tion of cod fishermen at work is haunting—and covers a lot of ground. While some of it...