From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers

Abstract

for some time Allan Kulikoff has been exploring the synthesis between “market” historians, who emphasize the rapid transformation of colonial North America toward capitalism, and “social” historians, who insist on the persistence of noncapitalist traditions. This new study argues for a composite portrait of the “small farmers” who accounted for “twothirds of colonial families,” drawing from mountains of scholarship produced by both the market and the social perspectives. Ku-likoff's small farmers emphasized family over wage labor, customary neighborhood exchange, and family and local exchange even though small surpluses “wound up” in distant markets. But they are also enterprising, eager to diversify, and willing to refine the household division of labor, and they become relatively market savvy. Although these characteristics would seem to clash in particular farm families, Kulikoff's synthesis of “big economic and demographic structures” erases many distinctions. The general conclusion that small farmers adopted market behaviors before the advent of a capitalist system is compelling, if unsurprising. Kulikoff argues that, as independent land ownership faded from the English and European countrysides, migration to North America permitted colonists to nurture their “expectation” of getting and working their own land. Migrants brought with them the centuries-old ideals of family self-sufficiency, a landed inheritance, and secure communities that granted economic opportunity. Relatively familiar stories of enclosure, internal migration, and servitude in Europe, starving times and dispossession of Indians in America, and getting land and building farms dominate the first chapters. By the eighteenth century the dominant English migration stream was replaced with waves of Ulster Protestants, Highlanders, and Palatines; distinctive agricultural regions developed; households consumed more goods and became more patriarchal.