Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 (review)

The debate over the conversion from local to international markets and from subsistence to capitalist relations in the northern countryside has been raging for a number of years along two parallel tracks. One, well articulated by Christopher Clark, among others, argues for lengthy continuance of traditional economies in rural society, while another, most forcefully put by Winifred Rothenberg, contends that capitalist relations entered into northern farming communities much earlier. There has not been much of a middle ground or an appreciation of social factors, though Clark's work approaches them. Martin Bruegel's award-winning book does much to bring the warring sides together with a masterful analysis of market society in the Hudson Valley during the first eighty years of American national history. That Bruegel mixes in social history skillfully makes his book of great interest beyond scholars such as myself who are fascinated with his deep research into the Hudson Valley. Of particular note is the polyglot nature of Hudson Valley society, a factor that adds further complexity to his narrative.

Bruegel's first chapters chronicle how family and neighborhood relations governed market behavior in Columbia and Green Counties in New York on the cusp of the American Revolutionóand even that conflict did not unduly disturb thick layers of traditional behavior. The locus of social interactions, Bruegel suggests, can be found less in churches and more in taverns. Unlike other scholars, Bruegel does not find taverns to be hotspots of republican ideology.

As an adherent of the Annales school of total history, Bruegel casts a wide net to show the gradual transformation of Hudson River society in myriad sectors, ranging from environmental changes, to the installation of roads, to the arrival initially of small-scale and then larger factories peopled by Irish immigrant workers and native-born women. With this narrative, Bruegel shows how local farmers, once close, now became more calculating. Bruegel's charting of the introduction of time/work discipline is a good example of his extensive scholarship. In addition to showing how labor and land became commodities in the early nineteenth century, and how that change resulted in longer labor contracts, Bruegel even shows the expanding use of clocks and pocket watches.

I found one aspect of his demographic explanation of industrialization to be off-kilter. Bruegel describes fairly late in his narrative the presence of African American farm workers, alongside the arrival of Irish immigrants. In fact, blacks, enslaved and free, had been a part of the local society and economy since the early eighteenth century. Had he introduced discussion of the long extinction of slavery, for example, Bruegel could have found changes in labor relations much earlier than he contends.

Bruegel's subtle analysis is very well shown in his discussion of local stores, in which he locates two coexisting "logics of exchange," one stemming from older, customary relations, another shaped by distant markets. His discussion of purchases of store-bought clothing has ramifications, which brings together urban and rural studies. Iwas quite taken with his discussion of the imposing influence of New York City on this local economy. Similarly, Bruegel is quite good in his description of the industrialization of mills. At the same time, he could have done more with his extensive lists of commodities sold in the stores, though his argument linking such sales and ayawning chasm of class is convincing.

The book is exceptionally well researched, especially in primary documents. His twenty-five pages of sources include two dozen extensive forays into local archives and historical societies. Decades after the onset of the new social history, the state's innumerable local libraries still have much to offer to the energetic researcher. Likewise, scholars of New York...