The Culture of Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century New York

Martin Bruegel. Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. xiii + 306 pp. Illustrations, tables, figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $21.95.

David M. Scobey. Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. xi + 340 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendix, notes, index. $40.00

New Yorkers call their home "the Empire State," and the nickname is an apt one because it describes both the imperial constraints of the old manorial system that rural residents shrugged off in the early 1800s and the dreams of empire that spurred on urban residents who transformed New York City from port to metropolis during the middle years of the nineteenth century.

The debate over "the transition to capitalism" had been in full swing for some time when I entered graduate school in the late 1980s. I remember being tremendously excited by two works that were published in 1990: Daniel Vickers's article, "Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America," and Christopher Clark's book, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Vickers and Clark wrote of rural people who were neither self-sufficient individuals destined to become capitalists, nor innocent victims of implacable forces destined to rob them of their independence. Both authors followed the chain of choices that ordinary men and women made—people made events happen, events didn't happen to them. Martin Bruegel follows in their footsteps with Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860. ¹

Bruegel characterizes the rural Hudson Valley of the late eighteenth century as "a thoroughly local place" (p. 39). Isolation, war worries, and bouts of bad weather, made life insecure. Good harvests allowed farmers to stockpile and plan for bad years rather than seize opportunities to sell surpluses. Labor was scarce, and neighbors had to help each other, trading goods and work with each other in kind. Face-to-face relationships meant classifying anyone who seemed to threaten the community as an outsider, and taverns were community forums where rituals kept violence between men in check. The shortage of labor limited production, families could not specialize, and they bartered with each other to keep their families fed. Fewer than half of the residents sent surpluses to river landings for trade, and most of those who did sold their goods to middlemen who sent the goods on to New York City. Even the relationships between farmers and merchants were very personal, though farmers usually considered merchants outsiders. Because of the primitiveness of the economy, merchants had no choice but to extend credit and keep long-running accounts, meaning that price fluctuations outside the valley usually did not dictate terms. Bruegel concludes that "when neighbors collaborated, when they swapped tools for help and then partook in a meal, they worked at lasting relationships: these constituted a moral economy" (p. 15).

The moral economy began to give way to a market economy in the 1810s. As New York's statewide population and economy grew, competition between producers led to new laws at both the state and local level to regulate the selling of goods. These regulations paved the way for impersonal contracts and ways of doing business that supplanted older face-to-face relationships. New Yorkers engaged in a flurry of road building during the first decade of the nineteenth century, making markets accessible to all. Farmers in the Hudson Valley began to specialize, experimenting with new grasses and raising more livestock to take advantage of increased demand. Scheduling and timetables became more important as the economy became more complex, until time became "a cash article," changing the way people made daily decisions about their actions (p. 83). As productivity increased and the number of entrepreneurs at the landings grew, farmers began to pick and choose...