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  • At Work in the Land of the Bean and the Cod
  • Christopher Clark (bio)
Daniel Vickers. Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1994. xxii 347 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, appendixes, and index. $45.00 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

Most colonial regions are condemned either to be consigned to economic marginality, or to be imprisoned in staple-export or monocrop economies that are unable to achieve diversity or widespread prosperity. New England, as Daniel Vickers points out early in this excellent book, managed to take a different path, and to emerge by the early nineteenth century as one of North America’s most diverse and dynamic regions. Among Vickers’s underlying purposes is to throw light on the reasons for this, to provide a prelude, so to speak, to the many books and articles that have examined New England’s nineteenth-century industrial transformation. Along the way he provides a vivid analysis of the rural and maritime economies of the colonial Northeastern seaboard.

Farmers and Fishermen is one of the best works yet written on early American economy and society. Its intelligence and sophistication is matched by its clarity and accessibility. Firmly grounded in local sources, it is nevertheless about very much more than Essex County alone. Although it will outlast current scholarly concerns, inevitably it will be read by some in light of recent debates on the “transition to capitalism” in America and the distinctions between what have been dubbed the “market” and “social” approaches to the early American economy — matters on which Vickers has already made notable contributions. 1 Among the book’s strengths is that it permits no simplistic reading of these questions, and it gives everyone concerned with them something to think about. It helps link together studies that stress the early colonial roots of later economic success with those that emphasize the transformations of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doing so by advancing its own clear view of the chronology and variety of colonial economic change.

New England was set up in the context of an expanding early modern [End Page 600] European capitalist economy. Fishing in particular evolved in this context and important changes in the industry marked not “the transition to capitalism... [but] developmental transition within capitalism” (p. 144). On the other hand, New England’s early development was not straightforward. The seventeenth-century frontier demanded rapid adjustments to social and working patterns brought from England. As circumstances subsequently changed New England economic life adjusted again in new directions. Vickers traces these shifts with clarity and skill. Central to his argument is that markets in capital and labor, initially suppressed by frontier shortages, eventually surfaced in Massachusetts fishing and farming, but at different times. The fact that, especially in the countryside, markets became important only when considerable economic diversification had already occurred helped “this corner of the New World eventually escape... the common colonial fate” (p. 8). 2

The discussion falls into three parts, each corresponding to a period in New Englanders’ mediation between their environment and economic culture. In the first period, roughly from 1630 to the last quarter of the seventeenth century, settlers on the land and coasts of Essex County faced the acute shortages of capital and labor endemic to a frontier society. Farm families who, Vickers points out, came from diverse English regions though with a common devotion to mixed farming, evolved a common pattern of land clearance, cultivation, and work organization. Servants and other hired workers were scare. Neighbors exchanged labor among themselves, but there was no labor market. The crucial relationship that emerged was between farmers and their sons, the former relying on the latter to do the work of clearing new land, the latter on the former for the transmission of land that would secure the next generation’s livelihood. Meanwhile, in the fisheries developing on the New England coast clientage relationships evolved between fishermen, many of whom owned their own small craft, and merchants who equipped them and supplied them and their families each season in return for the right to...

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