This book confronts head-on two pervasive ideas in the social sciences. On the one hand, it challenges the Marxian-Weberian idea that based on their economic ideology or behavior one can readily divide people into two camps: traditional or modern, pre-capitalist or capitalist, or what have you. This is an antithesis at the heart of historiographical debates about the market revolution, the transition to capitalism, the republican synthesis and the rise of liberalism, but an antithesis that I see rooted more in nineteenth-century American and Western exceptionalism than in hard empirical evidence. On the other hand, my research also challenges the idea espoused by neoclassical economists that people at all times and places are maximizers, maximizing some sort of utility function, an idea at the heart of most non-Marxian-Weberian theories in the social sciences. I find that both these dubious ideas not only distort our ability to understand other peoples past and present, but also our ability to understand ourselves today.
I must admit it was not my original intention to take on such a grandiose agenda. A little personal background will help you see how I was pushed into taking on the challenge. The seed of this book was planted in a Master’s thesis completed at the College of William & Mary and could easily have been left buried there if things had turned out the way I had anticipated. For the Master’s thesis I undertook what I thought was going to be a fairly straightforward bit of “new economic history” that I could turn into a quick article for a journal like Explorations in Economic History. It was a multiple-regression analysis of land acquisition in seventeenth-century Virginia as a way to test the two leading interpretations of economic-demographic development in early America: the neoclassical staples model and Turnerian Malthusian-frontier model.
Unfortunately for me, what I had first thought was going to be a quick and dirty verification of the more powerful staples model that would please neoclassically oriented economists and historians ended up being a highly confusing problem with many mixed findings about what the planters in seventeenth-century Virginia were up to. Indeed, my multiple regression analysis yielded evidence of a certain kind of behavior that neither theory would have led me to suspect. Staples theory suggests that seventeenth-century Virginians responded to market forces like neoclassical economic men maximizing profits: they supposedly responded to higher tobacco prices by increasing tobacco production and responded to lower tobacco prices by decreasing tobacco production. The Malthusian-frontier model suggests that seventeenth-century Virginians did not have the luxury of being able to respond to changing prices in such a fashion, early Americans had to maximize tobacco production all of the time simply in order to survive and raise a family on the rugged New World frontier.
But, in fact, my data showed that I was not dealing with neoclassical economic man or industrious frontiersmen. No, I found these seventeenth-century Virginians acting very “perversely” as economists would say, acting for all the world like the classic stereotype of traditional lazy peasants. They didn’t increase production in response to higher prices, they decreased production. They only increased production in response to falling tobacco prices.
In the time constraints of finishing up the thesis I left a lot of loose ends which bothered me but I believed the thesis was an important step in adding a little rigor to testing these theories. I had no intention at the time of pursuing the issue any further. As it was, my findings were too strange and unsure to lay the basis for an article. And for my dissertation at the University of Florida I wanted to undertake an analysis of antebellum Southern migration.
Indeed, even though I had decided not to continue working on the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, I nevertheless found myself continuing to address the same problem I had left unanswered. Consciously or unconsciously I was looking for a theory that could explain the type of peasant behavior that I thought I had observed in the colonial Chesapeake. I found some very promising ideas in the anthropological literature on peasants and Third World development most closely linked to the work of agricultural economists Ester Boserup and Alexander Chayanov. I tried floating these theories by historians and found very little enthusiasm for a deductive approach resting on peasant theories when applied to early American behavior from people on all sides of the historiographic spectrum.
As I kept pondering what to do with these theories I realized that the work of Malthus played a vital link in many of the those in which I was most interested, whether they were attacking or supporting him. Recognizing that perhaps I could sell my ideas better to historians if I linked my peasant theories and Malthusian-frontier theory to what Malthus actually said, I started reading Malthus and quickly found that he was much more complex that I had understood. Wanting to understand fully these ideas I started looking into the literature on Malthus’s predecessors. Before I knew it I found myself immersed in the work of seventeenth- and 18th-century British political economists.
British political economists from Thomas Mun in the early seventeenth century to Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century believed that only “necessity” (or as we might say, relative poverty, relative deprivation, or a falling standard of living), only necessity could overcome the natural laziness of Englishmen or of mankind in general. This is what they meant when they said “Necessity is the mother of invention,” a proverb that became quite popular in the seventeenth century, but which captures better than any other maxim the essence of the social science theory that seemed to best explain the perverse kind of behavior that I found in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.
One day it suddenly dawned on me that here was the solution to the Chesapeake problem. I had all along been knocking my head against a wall trying to sell to historians this social science approach to migration and getting nowhere. What I needed was not better social science theory but to show how ideas that seventeenth-century Englishmen used could explain behavior in seventeenth-century Virginia.
It should come as no surprise that such ideas were part of the cultural baggage of the first Anglo-Americans. I found these same ideas in seventeenth-century Virginia and indeed throughout the seventeenth-century colonies. But, at a higher level what I was still forced to do was address the resistance by historians and other social scientists to ideas that were once commonplace and for which I found strong support in the anthropological literature. I found the problem much deeper than a lack of grounding in anthropological theory or the history of political economy, rather a pervasive blindspot created by those two pervasive if antithetical paradigms in the social sciences: the Marxian-Weberian notion of a transition to capitalism and neoclassical utility maximization.