19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth three and a half stars, but not easy reading., March 21, 2001
For nearly forty years, historians have concentrated their attention on the social history of the common people. In American historiography in particular, remarkable progress has been made in the history of slaves, industrial workers and the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. But one group of people has not been treated with the prominence they deserve, and that is the rural majority of the first century and a half of the nation's existence. 95% of the United States was rural in 1776, and when you exclude the quarter that was slave and aboriginal, you have 70% that consisted of country people and their families, most of whom had or would eventually own land. It is clear that this high level of economic independence was crucial to the development of American democracy. Allan Kulikoff's book is the first of a multi-volume series that will examine the history of the American yeomen. Kulikoff concentrates on how farmers sought a degree of independence and security from the capitalist market. "Capitalist transformation, then, stands at the center of our story." In contrast to other historians Kulikoff argues that capitalism, crucially defined as a system of wage labor, "had not yet reached our shores as late as the American Revolution."
The result is a synthesis of the Colonial farmer to the American Revolution based on amazingly extensive reading of the secondary literature. This has to be the first book where the bibliography (104 pages) is longer than the endnotes (73 pages), and Kulikoff seems to have read every scholarly article on rural history. However, the actual connection between yeomanry and the rise of democracy is slated for another volume, as is their eventual demise. What we have here is a book that discusses the economics changes that lead the British and later the Germans to move to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have a chapter on how emigration took place, how the new immigrants met and eventually conquered the Indians, how they expanded up until 1776 and how they set up households and fixed themselves in relations to markets. Crucial to Kulikoff's account is how enclosure and other acts against the peasantry encouraged mass migration. Most migrants in fact moved within Europe (either to Ulster or to Eastern Europe), but enough moved to the Western hemisphere to successfully conquer it.
All this is very thorough and thoughtful but it is not easy reading. One problem is that Kulikoff abbreviates the books he is citing in his notes, so not only do you have to turn from your reading to the endnotes(which is always irritating), but then you often have to move from the endnotes to the bibliography. I am aware that many readers have a philistine prejudice against footnotes, but since this is not a book for a general audience their opinions should be ignored. Because of the structural focus of Kulikoff's work, the human element is somewhat downplayed in this book. Despite talking about such subjects as the dispossession of the British peasantry, war and atrocities against the Indians, the beating of wives and the maltreatment of servants, Kulikoff writes about these subjects in a style with the life bleached out of it. The contrast with Thompson and Genovese is striking. One might cruelly say that there is much here about demography, but little actual sex, much about diet as an ecological concept but little about food. While Kulikoff is right to discuss the ill-treatment of servants, the subordination of women and the first shoots of the weeds of a rural proletariat, more could have been said about the general trends in the standard of living, especially compared to Britain. Moreover what scholarly differences Kulikoff has are confined to brief comments in the endnotes, so Kulikoff's own voice is blurred. The result is that it is not clear to the reader that Kulikoff is saying something new. As such his emphasis that farmers were not simply small scale capitalists and that landownership rates rose as high as 90% in many areas of America is not made as forcefully as it could be. Only the last chapter, actually the epilogue, does Kulikoff come to life as he portrays a new picture of the American Revolution as a violent conflict, with various armies looting and pillaging both sides. There was mass emigration and hundreds were killed, indeed murdered, in Indian wars alone. (One remembers in particular the massacre of 90 peaceful praying Moravian Delawares who were slaughtered by frontier militia as they sang hymns and prayed.) Given the way American conservatives have prided themselves on their "successful" revolution in contrast to the French, it is very useful to learn that the per-capital income dropped more than 40% during the decade of revolution and had not returned to its pre-war level thirty years later. One can only wait for the next volume.
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