From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers

by Kulikoff, Allan

• ISBN13: 9780807825693
• ISBN10: 0807825697
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society.Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction From Peasants to Farmers	1	(6)
Prologue The Remaking of Rural England	7	(1)
The Medieval Legacy	8	(8)
The English Road to Agrarian Capitalism	16	(11)
Households and the Transformation of Gender Relations	27	(12)
From England to America	39	(34)
Colonial Promotion and Immigration	42	(11)
Motivations for Migration	53	(8)
Servants and Farmers, Mechanics and Merchants	61	(10)
From Emigrant to Immigrant	71	(2)
This Newfound Land	73	(52)
This Land Is Not Ours	75	(10)
This Land Should Not Be Theirs	85	(21)
This Land Is Ours	106	(19)
New Lands, New Peoples	125	(40)
Hugging the Coast: The Land System of Tidewater Areas	127	(11)
Conquest of the Borderlands	138	(7)
Moving to the Empty Land	145	(5)
Making a Home in the Hills and Valleys: Colonizing the Borderlands	150	(15)
Deprivation, Desire, and Emigration	165	(38)
A Peasant's and Worker's paradise?	167	(3)
Economic Development and British Emigration	170	(4)
Poverty and Poor Law in Britain	174	(6)
Decaying Feudalism in German Lands	180	(4)
Migration and Emigration	184	(6)
The Process of Emigration	190	(13)
Markets and Farm Households in Early America	203	(52)
To Market, To Market	205	(11)
Both a Borrower and a Lender Be?	216	(10)
Household Formation	226	(16)
Family Labor and Hired Hands	242	(13)
EPILOGUE The Farmers' War and Its Aftermath	255	(34)
Disruption of the Agrarian Economy	256	(5)
Who Plowed the Fields and Made the Corn?	261	(7)
The Ravages of War	268	(7)
The Balance of Terror	275	(2)
Refugees and Emigres	277	(3)
Rebuilding Farm Markets	280	(3)
New Peoples and New Lands	283	(6)
Afterword Toward a Farmers' Nation	289	(4)
Notes	293	(74)
Bibliography	367	(104)
Index	471