The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North by Emily Pawley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North by Emily Pawley Philip Mills Herrington (bio) Agriculture, Agricultural improvement, Capitalism, New York State The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North. By Emily Pawley. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 312. Cloth, $50.00.) Emily Pawley opens this book with a parade of freaks: the bloated bodies of the antebellum agricultural fair. Like these unusual, oversized fruits, vegetables, and animals, the improvers who lauded them at fairs and in the agricultural press can come across today as impractical and peripheral. [End Page 140] Indeed, critics of the time disparaged improvers as "book farmers," dreamy dabblers whose interest in the agricultural "arts and sciences" had little to offer working men or markets. Yet as Pawley reveals in this tightly written and exceptionally readable monograph, agricultural improvers were engaged in methods of assigning and measuring value that placed them in the mainstream of early nineteenth-century American capitalism. However poetically improvers may have described the fruits of the countryside, they sought to build an agricultural landscape that systematically converted nature into profit. In doing so, they "developed forms of varietal identification that resembled anticounterfeiting techniques and systems of credit ratings; used sales figures and profits as evidence of the value of particular techniques; and kept 'accounts' with animals, plants, and fields in their experiments" (18). Behind the curiosities of the country fair were emerging systems of measurement—tools of a vibrant and volatile antebellum capitalism that, as Pawley argues, was just as alive in the rural North as in nearby cities. While the title sets the stage as the antebellum North, Pawley tells a story centered on New York, citing, accurately, that the Empire State was the locus of northern improvement (given its location, wealth, farm productivity, and proliferation of agricultural societies and journals). Whether New York's status as an exemplar of improvement makes it representative of the North is debatable, but inarguably New York had an oversized role in shaping the values attached to American agriculture. Admirably, Pawley moves back and forth between using New York as the main setting for the action and as the center point for more sweeping regional, national, or global narratives. This strategy anchors the reader in place as the author reveals and removes different vistas like stage backdrops. A highlight in terms of argument and storytelling is Chapter 5, where New York examples bookend a much larger story. Here Pawley expertly unfolds the details of the "mulberry bubble" of the 1830s and 40s, the short-lived speculative craze during which Americans across the nation feverishly imported, exchanged, and sold (or attempted to sell) thousands of mulberry trees. In hindsight, this mania surrounding an East Asian shrub and the dream of a lucrative American silk industry seems foolish. But as Pawley points out, these actions "were not simply periodic fits of greed and madness, they were astonishing moments of belief, moments when larger numbers of people came to agree on a particular form of value and a particular kind of future" (126). Although easily dismissed as odd and ephemeral like the colossal squashes of the agricultural fairs, [End Page 141] these market failures illuminate how agricultural improvement shaped the values and vocabulary of early national finance. Failure, Pawley reminds us, is "a standard feature of capitalism" (16). As Pawley lays out in the first of eight chapters, agricultural improvement in New York was initially the domain of the "capitalist aristocracy" of the manors along the Hudson, but it quickly democratized, in part through the appropriation of its rhetoric, to include a diverse assortment of landowners, tenants, laborers, and city dwellers. It thus, Pawley concludes, "became a repository for more than one vision of agricultural modernity" (38). Yet as the author guides the reader through the various ways in which this disparate assortment of improvers engaged with the agricultural press, experimented with plants and animals, and hosted trials of farming implements, it is striking how unified they were in their assessment of the natural world. "Looking at the book of nature," Pawley writes, "improvers expected to see a balance sheet" (18). "Improvement" meant looking...