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New Yorkers call their home "the Empire State," and the nickname is an apt one because it describes both the imperial constraints of the old manorial system that rural residents shrugged off in the early 1800s and the dreams of empire that spurred on urban residents who transformed New York City from port to metropolis during the middle years of the nineteenth century. The debate over "the transition to capitalism" had been in full swing for some time when I entered graduate school in the late 1980s. I remember being tremendously excited by two works that were published in 1990: Daniel Vickers's article, "Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America," and Christopher Clark's book, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Vickers and Clark wrote of rural people who were neither self-sufficient individuals destined to become capitalists, nor innocent victims of implacable forces destined to rob them of their independence. Both authors followed the chain of choices that ordinary men and women madepeople made events happen, events didn't happen to them. Martin Bruegel follows in their footsteps with Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860.1 Bruegel characterizes the rural Hudson Valley of the late eighteenth century as "a thoroughly local place" (p. 39). Isolation, war worries, and bouts of bad weather, made life insecure. Good harvests allowed farmers to stockpile and plan for bad years rather than seize opportunities to sell surpluses. Labor was scarce, and neighbors had to help each other, trading goods and work with each other in kind. Face-to-face relationships meant classifying anyone who seemed to threaten the community as an outsider |
