From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (review)

A vacuum induces the recurring modern impulse to commit unitary synthesis of colonial North American history. As Allan Kulikoff explains it, American history once possessed a core narrative built of politics, but over the last several decades “the center of historical understanding has collapsed.” [5–6] Kulikoff therefore introduces From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers by proposing a metaphor for what has replaced the shattered consensus: a carousel on which each horse represents a topical master narrative privileging one set of voices over another. The first four horses belong to John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard (the export-based model), David Hackett Fischer (cultural stasis), Jack P. Greene (regional similarities), and D.W. Meinig (spatial organization). Kulikoff’s fifth horse is his own effort to bring small farmers center stage against a backdrop formed by England’s capitalist transformation between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He intends the book to introduce subsequent publications dealing largely with the nineteenth century.

Kulikoff defines a capitalist society as divided between owners who possessed “the means of production (banks, factories, tools, and productive land)” and workers who did not. [2] By the sixteenth century agrarian capitalists in England began evicting peasant farmers from traditional locations and relationships, beginning the transformation of peasants (small farmers who worked as little as twenty-five acres) into disenfranchised unskilled workers with nothing to sell but their own labor. Through subsequent generations, descendants of the displaced peasants tenaciously yearned for land and the independent competency that it represented—“the ability to grow (or trade for) most of their food, make most of their own clothing, and cut down most of the firewood needed for winter.” [3]

After about a century of consolidation, England’s agrarian capitalists launched a series of foreign ventures, colonies they peopled with the landless laborers created by their landed fathers and grandfathers. Capitalists enticed colonists with promises of land, and for a large majority of North American immigrants and their children the peasant dream, economic competency, finally came true. Extensive private land ownership by small farmers thereby guaranteed that although Americans before the American Revolution “swam in a capitalist sea,” they were not capitalists. [2] Thus they remained after the Revolution and long into the nineteenth century, thanks to repeated territorial expansions that “sustained an agrarian way of life—based on energetic labor by the entire family, subsistence production, neighborly exchange, sale of surpluses, and movement to new lands.” [292] Taken collectively, the challenges to farm families—economic, environmental, and martial—wore away the last of their peasant and English vestiges, revealing a new people, the American farmers.

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers will reach a diverse audience. The 114-page bibliography reflects Kulikoff’s determination to sound the historiographical depths, and graduate students and specialists will find this compilation a valuable resource. Panoramic overviews provide essential contexts for the generalist, as in Kulikoff’s reminder of central European journeys to the east; well over 700,000 Germans and another 335,000 Swiss emigrated during the extended eighteenth century, but the great majority of them chose destinations in Prussia, Hungary, Poland and Russia—not in America. The book’s thirty-four-page epilogue, “The Farmers’ War and its Aftermath,” offers an insightful examination of the vast destruction and widespread misery that the Revolutionary War brought to American farmers, and is sure to be widely assigned in undergraduate surveys of the era.

These merits decidedly outweigh the book’s shortcomings, but nevertheless there are some problems. Kulikoff’s own research and quantitative analysis long have been recognized for their scope and quality, but perforce writers of master narratives have always depended on the accuracy of strangers. This reliance necessarily threatens to review previous errors. For example, Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown’s tabulations of Virginia landholding in Richmond and Augusta Counties underrate acreage in the former by over one fifth of the total, and in the latter by...