Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

== Summary ==
his
book explores how industrial capitalism emerged from rural societies in the
American Northeast (Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts). It examines this
phenomenon by looking at how rural people saw, responded to, and transformed
the world they lived in (household structure). He presents a middle ground
synthesis between “market and social interpretations” and argues that “markets
are not determinant but are created in and derived from social circumstances.”
The creation of markets was only one part of a wider shift in social and
cultural relationships. The social structure of the mid-19th century
resulted not from a single transition but from a set of interactions.
“Demography, land shortage, the ‘market,’ household strategies, and capital
accumulation …came together… to alter the character of rural new England.”(318)
It was the slow accretion of a series of distinctive forms and organizations – shifts
in the exchange systems, the use of credit, the emergence of cash and
negotiable paper instruments and the charging of interest on debts – together
came to form a new economic system. Clark challenges the
notion that rural people were “passive victims” of the extension of the market;
in contrast, he sees rural household farms (social structure – property
distribution and division of labor) as shaping the terms on which they agreed
to deal with developments taking place elsewhere. The absence of staple-crop
exports in the late 18th century and the relative autonomy of
independent farmers meant that sources of economic change in rural New England
were internal to the rural economy. “The
spring that drove the intensification of rural output in the late eighteenth
century was the confrontation between families’ aspirations and the prospect of
scarcities under the prevailing conditions of land distribution, production and
exchange.”(325)
Example: The
intensified rural production and the strains that it imposed led to an outward
turning of the economy. Young men and women began to seek careers outside of
farming. In particular, production and reproduction fell disproportionately to
women, who then shifted their strategies to ease the burdens on them
(textile/cloth). Moreover, the tension between parental authority and
children’s concern to set up their own independent households was part of the
spur to increased rural output between 1790 and 1820
See also: Charles Sellers, Joyce Boydston, Stuart Blumin,