From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers. By Allan Kulikoff. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 484. $59.95, cloth; $22.50, paper.

Abstract

Based on a selective reading of over 2,500 secondary sources, From British Peasants is an encyclopedic description of early U.S. social history that attempts to describe the transformation of feudal rural folk from deferential “peasants” into economically and politically independent “farmers” (p. 1). Allan Kulikoff analyzes the alleged transformation through the lens of materialist Marxism (pp. 293–98, where he cites Marx as an authority five times). References to problematic terms such as “class relations” abound (pp. 2, 41, 289–92), and Kulikoff argues, among other things, that “gentlemen” attempted to oppress farmers by refusing “to grant them freehold land,” by forcing “them into permanent tenancy,” by “passing high taxes,” and even by failing “to protect them from bandits or Indians.” Kulikoff further claims that “gentlemen and capitalists dominated legislatures,” engaged in an “orgy of development,” and “violently suppressed” rural rebellions (pp. 288–91). Yet somehow the mighty yeomen “stopped deferring to gentlemen and insisted on democratic decision making” (p. 291).