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Allan Kulikoff, "The Transition to Capitalism in America Revisited" This paper will revisit and reshape the controversy of the 1970s and 1980s over the transition to capitalism. The early Americanists who participated in that controversy argued about the origins of capitalism in rural America, from the early seventeenth through the nineteenth century. They dealt with farm households, farm enterprises, and farmer ideology and behavior. Their key questions concerned how farmers and their families managed to keep capitalist relations of production at bay for so long (or perhaps they didn’t, as some argued); why they resisted such a system (if they did); in an increasingly commercialized and capitalist world, how farmers framed their lives and work, and how they devised non- capitalist or anticapitalist ideologies. Disagreements multiplied (over commercial farms, forms of exchange, farmer ideology, the reasons for farmer behavior, for instance), no adequate answers appeared, and the controversy petered out, at least in part because the debate tended to ignore industrialization, slavery and servitude, and indeed the entire South.
Over the past several decades, no one has rethought the question of the origins of American capitalism. It is time to do so. New work on the Atlantic world (particularly the Atlantic slave trade and slave work, Betty Wood’s specialities), women and gender, cities, and industrialization suggests the need to place the origins of American capitalism into a more spacious framework. This work, while rarely referring to the controversy, provides data that mandates revisions in our understanding of American capitalism. Earlier work on capitalism in early American examined households, families, and communities as discrete units that developed particular market relationships. The new work in economic and social history sketched above thrusts analysis of capitalism outward to broader Atlantic, indeed global, capitalist development and inward to the responses of households and individuals within households to economic change. This paper will argue that farm households were part of a world capitalist economy which sustained farms, workshops, and businesses. Moreover, households were composed of smaller sets of social and economic relations—the internal conflicts and negotiations between husbands and wives; parents and children; masters and mistresses and hired hands, servants, and slaves. Historians have missed these familial conflicts or, at best, have made them a minor theme in their story of the coming of capitalism. This paper will further argue that non-capitalist social relations persisted in much of rural America because the global capitalist system developed rapidly. Southern yeoman farmers and slave-owners alike owed their vaunted independence to the capitalism they often claimed to despise. Slaves made the tobacco that Europeans used, the rice they ate, and eventually the cotton they wore, while slave-owners thought themselves paternalists for their families, white and black. Northern shipyards built slave vessels, providing employment to free men and profits to merchants. Mid-Atlantic farmers helped feed West Indian slaves who made the sugar that the English textile workers consumed. Northern farmers, who mostly produced small surpluses, bought the cloth the textile workers made, thus closing this complex trading circle. Even as households (as income-pooling units) struggled over the extent of their participation in the market, courts and newspapers were filled with conflicts within households. Servants bought suits about poor treatment; husbands and wives squabbled over children and the distribution of work; children and apprentices ran away from home, seeking their fortunes (or merely a subsistence) elsewhere. Wives (who resisted migration to frontiers where their husbands could avoid capitalism, at least for a while) may have gained benefits from capitalism their husbands didn’t enjoy. Building on these general points about the global economy and household relations, this paper will sketch out a new narrative of the coming of capitalism, one that will incorporate new research and reach for new questions. It will seek to integrate labor markets with familial ideologies, immigration with industrial capital, a new urban bourgeoisie with a new urban proletariat, classes that would dominate nineteenth-century America. |
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