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Reviews in American History 29.3 (2001) 346-351



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Turner Redux

Lorri Glover


Allan Kulikoff. From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiii + 484 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95.

Allan Kulikoff's synthesis of farm life in early modern Europe and colonial America begins and ends with Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision of the American Republic. Kulikoff shares Jefferson's fascination with and glorification of the small independent farmer who moved his family and the American dream of independent landownership into the West. The capitalist market economy, overtaking Europe by the seventeenth century, was held in abeyance by these American farmers who participated in Atlantic markets but remained beyond the control of those markets through the revolutionary era. The environment of North America posed a much greater threat to the ambitions of colonial farmers--in particular, we are told, seventeenth-century migrants found "that sickness, death, and Indians lurked everywhere" (p. 54). Despite this trilogy of environmental threats (an unfortunate grouping that Kulikoff repeats at least a dozen times), small landholders persevered and built families and communities, which thrived by interweaving household production, communal exchange, and surplus market sales. When land grew scarce and sons restive, farm families moved west. They were joined on the frontier in the early eighteenth century by a second wave of emigrants from Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and Germany who, Kulikoff asserts, were marked by their passion for land and the bold risks they assumed to become landowners. Kulikoff concludes by arguing, "This empire of freeholders, spreading endlessly into the west, made an old land forever new, turned potential wage laborers into independent farmers, and sustained an agrarian way of life" into the nineteenth century (p. 292).

In recent years colonialists have increasingly emphasized the localistic nature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies and sought to shed light on the diverse communities and marginalized peoples of early America. As a result, community and case histories have proliferated. Identity analysis represents the culmination--or nadir, depending on one's perspective--of this trend in the scholarship. As microhistory triumphed, a great deal of hand-wringing [End Page 346] about "fragmentation" and "trivialization" ensued. Some historians sought to focus attention on the Atlantic world, not simply challenging but inverting the focus on localism. And a handful of exceptional books, aimed at integrating these disparate studies and reversing this tide in the historiography, appeared in the late 1990s. From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers adds to the growing list of Atlantic world studies and new master narratives. Depicting colonial American farmers in an Atlantic context, it also parallels the syntheses of Ira Berlin (Many Thousands Gone, 1998), Colin Calloway (New Worlds for All, 1997) and Joan Gundersen (To Be Useful to the World, 1996) on early American slavery, Indian-white relations, and women, respectively. The reader of Kulikoff's grand narrative must, however, be attentive to what he excludes. Slaves, Indians, planters, and merchants receive scant consideration. Even among the white small farmers he investigates, Kulikoff ignores religion, ideology, and class identity. (The latter he intends to investigate in a subsequent book.) On the other hand, Kulikoff immersed himself in the historiography of the early modern Atlantic world and he weaves together analyses of landholding, economic fluctuations, crops and diet, disease and mortality, family dynamics and gender relations, migration patterns, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in western Europe. Peasants to Farmers evidences Kulikoff's mastery of the scholarship on farm life and land use across four centuries and on two continents. The result is a work of awesome scope that leaves the reader with a host of unanswered questions.

Peasants to Farmers begins with an extensive investigation of the English background to the seventeenth-century colonization of North America. Early migrants, unable to control or own land and pushed into poverty and mobility because of the enclosure movement, looked across the Atlantic for a new opportunity to bring their old dreams of assured land usage and stable peasant communities to fruition. Kulikoff is at his best when explaining how economic...

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