Kulikoff on the Market Transition

The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism

Allan Kulikoff, 1992

Allan Kulikoff may be one of a very few American historians who count Karl Marx as a significant inspiration. In this book, Kulikoff didn’t really show that American capitalism began in the rural areas. But he did stake a claim about the market transition. “We need a model of rural development that links time and place in various regions,” he said. “The capitalist transformation of rural America provides such a synthesis.” Kulikoff advanced a general explanation based on Marxist theory, that he believed covered changes across the entire frontier, from colonial times into the twentieth century. This is a difficult task, even if you take structural determinism loosely, in the sense of Marx’s famous explanation: “Men make their own history, but they do no make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (quoting Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 97). And this approach privileged the economic interpretation, “embedd[ing] class struggle in ethnic or cultural rivalry” rather than approaching these head-on as legitimate confrontations.

Kulikoff followed E.P. Thompson’s definition of social class (Thompson “warns against any ‘tendency to read back subsequent notions of class’ into societies where people ‘saw themselves and fought...in terms of ‘estates’ or ‘ranks’ or ‘orders.’”), admitting “it would be difficult to find classes in rural America until the late nineteenth century.” But he argued for including farmers in class analysis, even though they did not fit in several ways. What Kulikoff tried to do here is really useful, I think, even though I don’t buy the Marxist structure at all. He admitted that “such classes as farmers do not fit into a two-class schema because they resemble both proletarians and bourgeoisie, and are thereby located in ‘more than one class simultaneously’” (quoting E.O. Wright). The obvious question is, then, how far do we want to stretch the model, before we admit it doesn’t fit? Kulikoff seemed to think it provided some structure that other language doesn’t. Come to think of it, what other language is available?

The most difficult parts of the book for me were where Kulikoff tried to stick close to the party line. “For most Marxists,” he said, “an understanding of capitalism begins with free labor...Wage earners become free laborers only when their work creates surplus value.” Why dwell on this tortured definition (not “free” in the sense of “not-slave”? and not “labor” unless there’s surplus value?) when it clearly doesn’t apply to the overwhelming majority of farmers in American history? That’s not to say it doesn’t apply anywhere; as Kulikoff mentioned later, there were rural wage workers in mines, on railroad and canal projects, etc. And there was the complicated interaction with the “capitalist state” that “appropriated tax or public resources to capitalist enterprises” (for example, land grants to American railroads) “and allowed entrepreneurs to violate the property rights of original owners in the name of development” (large water mills built for early factories that flooded farmlands). The national government also created a body of law and usage regarding subsoil resources, to encourage large-scale western mining. But America conquered the Indians during a period that partly predated Kulikoff’s capitalist growth phase. Was that capitalism or empire?

From time to time, it’s noticeable that Agrarian Origins was a set of essays. Chapter Five, “The Revolution and the Making of the American Yeoman Classes” appered in an anthology by Young. Other chapters were stronger, less packed with theory, and more balanced. Discussing the transition to capitalism, Kulikoff said, “The rural economy of early America was clearly commercial. It can be described as undergoing either an intensification of capitalist production or a transformation from noncommercial or at least noncapitalist social formation to a capitalist one...Where one scholar examining account books sees intricate exchanges of labor and goods between kindred and neighbors, another insists that these exchanges are commercial and documents that assertion by comparing prices...in urban markets.” Either way, both historians could agree that the situation was changing to one of increasing market embeddedness over time, in nearly all rural areas. “Both sides,” he said, “deny the existence of either subsistence agriculture or self-sufficient farms,” a refinement I think of his earlier claim that the yeoman recreated his world as he moved west. “A judicious synthesis of these two visions of economic exchange,” he concluded, “better describes the American reality than either of them alone.”

The peculiar and interesting aspect of rural history was that the yeomen were “farmers who owned the means of production and participated in commodity markets in order to sustain familial autonomy.” This might mean they had a foot in both the proletarian and capitalist camps, or that they were something different that didn’t fit the urban model. Kulikoff said “Urban workers shared with yeomen a republican producer ideology, an insistence on looking at themselves as economically independent, and struggles to control their own labor.” But they were not independent in the way yeomen were, because they were increasingly at the mercy of capitalists who owned the factories and mills. It would be interesting to look at “Proletarianized wage labor -- in agriculture, ranching, mining, railroad construction, textiles” to see how widespread it was in rural areas, and how it may have effected farm families economies over time. It would also be interesting to see if there were political divisions between family farms and “Highly capitalized bonanza wheat farms and small but intensely developed fruit and vegetable farms” using migrant labor in the northeast and California.

“Even as the number of farms rose to a historical peak between 1890 and 1910, family farming became increasingly precarious.  Although one (or more) children of farmers usually followed their parents’ calling, farming became an almost closed system, requiring prior family landownership for entry.” (paraphrasing Friedburger and Shover) This is interesting! It seems to fit that period when the tone of agriculture and activism seemed to be changing just prior to Populism and the Country Life Movement.

In Chapter Three, “The Languages of Class in Rural America,” Kulikoff traced the political use of agrarian themes beginning in the colonial era. After the American Revolution, he said “Federalists appealed most to commercial farmers...while Republicans sought support from poorer farmers...Fragmentary evidence suggests that voters understood party appeals in this way and responded accordingly.” By the 1830s, when large tracts of government land were being transferred to private hands, Whig politicians claimed “Squatters and Speculators...conspired to prevent poor men from getting land.” They may have been reacting to dissatisfaction among the poor about whose hands the land was ending up in -- or perhaps to the fairly prohibitive cost of getting land and moving west. (check Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats, and Democrat George Evans, a “master polemicist of land reform” in the early 1840s)

In Chapter Seven, “Free Migration and Cultural Diffusion in Early America, 1600-1860,” Kulikoff traced immigration, persistence, and internal migration, with some surprising results. Beginning in England, he noted that “By the mid-seventeenth century two-fifths of rural England’s population worked for wages...At least three-fifths of rural English youths worked as servants in husbandry...Nearly all boys became servants, starting in their mid-teens.” He continued, “A dual migration system fed movement to North America in the 1770s. One group of emigrants, mostly from London and its hinterland, consisted of young, unmarried craftsmen who came as indentured servants. The other group, from Yorkshire and Scotland, fled the threat of land expropriation, moved in family groups, and had sufficient income to procure colonial land” (cf. Leonard Richards on Shays’s Rebellion). Kulikoff said “nearly two-thirds of English-speaking emigrants to North America came as indentured servants.” The combination of their experience in Britain and the Colonies suggests an attitude about service (and presumably wage-labor) that would push them toward an ideal of agrarian freehold independence.

“Migrants born in New England between 1701 and 1740 moved just under forty miles over their lifetimes,” Kulikoff said. “Few farmers moved to the cities, even temporarily, and many of them moved back tot he countryside. As late as the 1850s over nine-tenths of farm families with children either remained in a rural area or moved between rural places.” He continued, “Nineteenth-century northeastern cities attracted highly skilled and educated merchants, craftsmen, and manufacturers...[but] Most native-born migrants with capital moved to frontier areas.” By the 1840s, “Long-distance migrants covered hundreds of miles in a series of sequential moves, accumulating savings in each place to finance movement further west.” And “Chain migration focused settlement: New Yorkers of New England stock settled in Michigan [the Ranney family I studied is an excellent example]; North Carolina Quakers moved en masse to Indiana; upland South families dominated many southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois counties…As many as several hundred thousand men may have been recruited and brought west to work on Railroads alone.”

Kulikoff argued that “The rapid turnover of Frontier populations increased the difficulties of community formation and cultural development. Between three-fifths and four-fifths of frontier residents moved within a decade of arrival.” Germans, “coming from a country where capitalism had long predominated...sought the independence they believed American yeomen possessed but immediately produced for commodity markets. Notwithstanding their similarities to Yankees, they saw themselves as different and tried to settle among their countrymen.” It seems like they did not associate yeoman independence with non-market orientation. This would be an interesting way to try to get at their expectations and the myth of agrarianism they were buying into (cf. K.N. Conzen). This was also a point where the story got complicated by capitalism again: “Between 1862 and 1871, railroads received over a hundred million acres from the federal government and millions more from states.”

In his conclusion, Kulikoff noted that while “Agribusinesses produce nearly all of our food, a majority of American farms are still family operated.” The supply-chain allowing this apparent anomaly is a subject for further study. Kulikoff mentioned several others, including long-term studies of regions from their settlement to the present. He said the relationship between the countryside and the city was understudied, especially as communication and transportation made the two areas more culturally homogenous [again, this was evident in my study of the Ranneys].  Development of rural labor and the impact of state policy on rural history were other areas Kulikoff suggested for additional study.