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

This deeply researched account of the market revolution in the mid-Hudson River Valley adds nuance and concreteness to a historiography that has been at times overly stark and abstract. Drawing on a theoretical model laid out by Braudel to understand the relationship between local and long-distance trade (and the social values that accompanied them), Bruegel also attempts to heed the Annalistes' call for a histoire totale by casting his methodological net widely to include social, economic, cultural, political, and gender analyses.¹ In the process, Bruegel successfully navigates a middle course between those scholars who dwell on the remnants of a "moral economy" well into the nineteenth century and those who trumpet the early dominance of a liberal, capitalistic mindset and its concomitant market behaviors.

Bruegel's complex—at times even dense—study combines a chronological and thematic organization. The first two chapters examine the immediate post-Revolutionary era, which was marked by economic insecurity and localism. Farmers embraced a dual-value system: When engaged in local trade, they emphasized personal, face-to-face relationships based on the value of labor, whereas their long-distance trade revolved around a more abstract credit relationship based on market value. The book's middle chapters chart the expansion of commercial agriculture in the early republic, when "economic development and growth in a market framework now appeared as a desirable process" and when wage labor made its first noteworthy appearance (89). Yet, farmers remained committed to a "meaning of work that remained social even as they moved toward an experience in which cash would function as the medium of exchange" (125.) The book's final three chapters trace the emergence of a rural working class, changes in consumption patterns, and social reform and political protest. By the 1850s, the mid-Hudson River Valley bore many of the marks of modern capitalism, though its residents still struggled to find the right balance between liberty and equality.

As Bruegel is quick to acknowledge, his study focuses on a region that had an unusual social and economic organization. Until the mid-1840s, its landscape included enormous manors, owned by patroons who let out their land to tenants. Bruegel rightly notes that this peculiar system (on the American scene, at least) has not received proper attention from historians, particularly those who have downplayed social conflict. Nonetheless, he fails to explain adequately his own decision to craft a study that "recognizes the particularity of manorial social relations yet ... refrains from emphasizing their uniqueness to construe them as an extreme manifestation of a generally shared but increasingly contested value system and model of social behavior whose halcyon days predated the American Revolution" (8.) The book would have benefited from a more expansive discussion of the relationship between this region's development and the market revolution more generally. Not only did the Hudson River Valley retain vestiges of semi-feudalism; it simultaneously stood at the cutting edge of capitalist development, located along one of the main commercial thoroughfares in North America, particularly after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825.