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The Roots of Rural Capitalism - Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Paperback, New edition)
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The Roots of Rural Capitalism - Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Paperback, New edition)
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Between the late colonial period and the Civil War, the countryside
of the American northeast was largely transformed. Rural New
England changed from a society of independent farmers relatively
isolated from international markets into a capitalist economy
closely linked to the national market, an economy in which much
farming and manufacturing output was produced by wage labor. Using
the Connecticut Valley as an example, The Roots of Rural Capitalism
demonstrates how this important change came about. Christopher
Clark joins the active debate on the "transition to capitalism"
with a fresh interpretation that integrates the insights of
previous studies with the results of his detailed research. Largely
rejecting the assumption of recent scholars that economic change
can be explained principally in terms of markets, he constructs a
broader social history of the rural economy and traces the complex
interactions of social structure, household strategies, gender
relations, and cultural values that propelled the countryside from
one economic system to another. Above all, he shows that people of
rural Massachusetts were not passive victims of changes forced upon
them, but actively created a new economic world as they tried to
secure their livelihoods under changing demographic and economic
circumstances. The emergence of rural capitalism, Clark maintains,
was not the result of a single "transition"; rather, it was an
accretion of new institutions and practices that occurred over two
generations, and in two broad chronological phases. It is his
singular contribution to demonstrate the coexistence of a
family-based household economy (persisting well into the nineteenth
century) and the market-oriented system of production and exchange
that is generally held to have emerged full-blown by the eighteenth
century. He is adept at describing the clash of values sustaining
both economies, and the ways in which the rural household-based
economy, through a process he calls "involution," ultimately gave
way to a new order. His analysis of the distinctive role of rural
women in this transition constitutes a strong new element in the
study of gender as a factor in the economic, social, and cultural
shifts of the period. Sophisticated in argument and engaging in
presentation, this book will be recognized as a major contribution
to the history of capitalism and society in nineteenth-century
America.
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