The Origins of American Capitalism

The United States has long played a central role in scholarly debates about the origins and nature of capitalism. Indeed when American and European social scientists began to regularly employ the term in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they had the United States very much in mind. Werner Sombart, who probably did more than anyone to inject the term into popular and academic discourse, believed that “the Americans are filled with the most perfect expression” of the modern spirit of capitalism. He also thought that “the early stages of the capitalist spirit changed into the later and fully perfect stages sooner and more completely in America than anywhere else,” at least by the beginning of the nineteenth century at a time when the spirit of capitalism was still not quite developed in Europe. 1

Greed of gain, devotion to work to a degree which might even be regarded as folly, the chase of profit irrespective of all other considerations, the highest degree of economic rationalism; in short, the characteristic features of a highly developed capitalist system‑-you will find them all in the United States before the Civil War. 2

Sombart found much evidence for such a mindset in the comments of mid-nineteenth-century European visitors to America like Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier. 3

Today we take for granted that we live in a capitalist world. But what exactly is capitalism? To the average American, the term is non-problematic. It simply captures the essence of what America is all about, for good or bad, the world of big business, Wall Street, private enterprise, the antithesis of Soviet-style communism. The man in the street may be vaguely aware that capitalism has a history, that, at some time in the past, his ancestors emerged out of some other pre-capitalist world, just as eastern Europeans are doing today. But the details do not concern him for he lives with both feet firmly planted in the capitalist world.

Historians also accept that today we live in a capitalist world. But for them capitalism is much more problematic for they are very much concerned with that history. Indeed one of the chief responsibilities of history as a discipline is to try to explain when, where, how, and why we came to be capitalist. And over these questions historians have been debating for most of the twentieth century.

Some have argued that America was born capitalist, others that America only gradually became so and that the timing was different in the North and the South. In the North, estimates of the birthdate of capitalism vary from the day that John Winthrop stepped off the Arbella to the coming of the mills in the nineteenth century. In the South, numerous scholars have suggested the transition came much later than the North, only with the demise of slavery after the Civil War, or perhaps the “New South” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, or even as late as the Great Depression and World War II. But other believe that the slave plantation economy of the South had always been essentially capitalist.

Why such divergent opinions over something seemingly as fundamental as the origins of capitalism? Is it because there is strong disagreement over the “facts” from any particular place and time? Not really. Scholars may accede to practically all the empirical evidence, and yet vehemently disagree over whether that time and place was basically capitalist because, at some level, they may simply disagree on what they mean by capitalism. Seeking the origins of anything can be quite perilous, but if you cannot even agree on what you mean by that thing, then getting agreement on origins is next to impossible. But even if scholars fundamentally agree on the evidence and what they mean by capitalism, they may still sharply differ on how to interpret that evidence. Indeed the evidence may readily lead to multiple interpretations. Clearly the idea of capitalism, however non-problematic it might be for the man in the street, for academics is quite problematic.

Before we can attempt to understand the origins of American capitalism, we need to sort out these problems of definition and evidence by looking closer at the debates that historians and other social scientists have engaged in. We will begin by exploring the debates on the capitalism in the early American North, and then turn to the early American South.

Early American North

By America, Sombart‑-like Tocqueville and Chevalier before him‑- meant, of course, the United States North, not the United States South. But then, Americans even in the antebellum era did not need foreigners to tell them that the North and South were different. Indeed the very label “Yankee” that antebellum Americans employed to describe Northerners‑-and foreigners used to describe Americans in general‑-captured in many ways the qualities that later scholars like Sombart would associate with capitalism. The Yankee was praised for his thrift, industry, asceticism, but equally condemned as mercenary, hypocritical, and Philistine. 4 History textbooks would long portray the coming of the Civil War as a struggle between a capitalist North and an agrarian South. 5

Because of its centrality to both cross-disciplinary debates about the origins of capitalism and historiographical debates about the coming of the Civil War, the history of capitalism in the early American North has received a great deal of attention. Thus it is no surprise that the classic frameworks for explaining the origins of American capitalism have focused on the North. These frameworks have tended to fall into three neat categories which we might call Weberian, Turnerian, and Smithian-Marxian.

Weberian Debate

Max Weber’s theory about the Calvinist origins of capitalism has necessarily involved students of both colonial America and England, since Puritanism strongly shaped both intellectual environments and Weber’s case rested equally on evidence from both sides of the Atlantic. 6 For his basic insights into the “spirit of capitalism,” Weber (as did Sombart before him) drew heavily upon the writings of that quintessential American, Benjamin Franklin. In his seminal essay Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Weber quoted a number of Franklin’s homilies beginning with:

Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. 7

To many of Weber’s fellow Germans, Benjamin Franklin’s homilies smacked of “pure hypocrisy.” The very thought that honesty, punctuality, industry, and frugality might be defined as virtues for their ability to assure credit! But, for Weber, such epithets captured perfectly the “spirit of capitalism.”

In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that form the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principles of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. 8

Weber had no doubt where this spirit came from either. The answer lay in Franklin’s Puritan roots:

If we thus ask, why should ‘money be made out of men’, Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings’ (Prov, xxii. 29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic, as expressed in the passages we have quoted, as well as in all his works without exception. 9

This concept of earning money as one’s calling was, for Weber, “the fundamental basis” of “the social ethic of capitalistic culture” and one that was brought to America by the Puritan settlers of New England. As Weber observed, “There were complaints of a peculiarly calculating sort of profit‑seeking in New England, as distinguished from other parts of America, as early as 1632.” 10

Vernon Louis Parrington in his 1927 classic Main Currents in American Thought incorporated Weber’s ideas into the long-lived “Progressive synthesis” of American history. “From the Puritan conception of the stewardship of talents,” wrote Parrington, “came a new ethic of work that provided a sanction for middle‑class exploitation, by supplanting the medieval principle of production for consumption with the capitalistic principle of production for profit.” 11 Thirty years later, Carl Degler made Weber’s thesis a cornerstone of the “Consensus” or “Counter-Progressive” synthesis as well, best summed up by his oft-quoted line that “Capitalism Came in the First Ships” to America. 12

Yet the notion that capitalism came in the first ships has never won total acceptance. Indeed, however popular Weber’s thesis, many academics find the religious and capitalist spirits adamantly opposed. These “anti-Weberians” believe capitalism triumphed only with the demise of Puritanism. 13

Turnerian Debate

Over the course of the twentieth century, this Weberian argument has become entangled with another debate traceable to Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebrated frontier thesis. Although most people familiar with Turner’s frontier thesis think immediately of his emphasis on the link between the frontier, free land, and democracy, Turner actually had quite a lot to say about the origins of American capitalism. 14

Turner believed that the pioneer faith in “individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent”‑-or what he elsewhere calls “the squatter ideal” or “the ideal of competitive individualism”‑-fundamentally shaped the American character. 15 The American frontier was “a new environment” in which the individual was “given an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order,” unrestrained by “the cake of custom” or government. 16 “Here were mines to be seized, fertile valleys to be preempted, all the natural resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest.” 17 In such an environment, “energy, incessant activity, became the lot of this new American.” 18 The American pioneer honored “the self-made man,” “the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest: it was ‘every one for himself.'” 19

In Turner’s eyes, this pioneer squatter ideal eventually gave rise to the great “captains of industry” like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie after the Civil War. 20

From this society, seated amidst a wealth of material advantages, and breeding individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of design, came the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry arose and seized on nature’s gifts. 21

Although the captains of industry would soon enough abandon a strict pioneering individualism in favor of cooperation and combination, Turner‑-taking at face value the words of the industrialists themselves‑-believed that they were simply “applying squatter doctrines,” that they were “pioneers under changed conditions.” Although Turner found it ironic that “the outcome of free competition under individualism was to be monopoly of the most important natural resources and processes by a limited group of men,” he acknowledged that “contests” had always implied “alliances as well as rivalries,” and the rise of giant corporations reflected a quite natural response to the late nineteenth-century realities of a national market and the stress caused by various economic panics and depressions. In “the course of competitive evolution,” “the old pioneer individualism” and “the self-made man” had given way to “the force of social combination.” 22

Other scholars have followed Turner in highlighting the American frontier as a Hobbesian war of man against man in a struggle for survival, status, power, and wealth that transformed traditional Europeans into modern Americans. The end result in early America was the unleashing of a “buccaneering capitalism” as all men fiercely competed for the factors of production in pursuit of the “main chance.” Turner’s frontier thesis also became incorporated into both the Progressive and Consensus syntheses. 23

Nevertheless, the Turnerian argument has not gone unchallenged. “Anti-Turnerians” suggest that, far from being a Hobbesian state of nature, the New World environment actually fostered cooperation and interdependence. In an important 1941 essay attacking what he called “The Myth of Frontier Individualism,” Mody C. Boatright stressed “the numerous ways in which the principle of mutuality finds expression in frontier life”‑-group migration, corporate communities, taking care of widows and sick neighbors, church or school raisings, frontier hospitality. All these activities reflect “a strong corporate feeling whereby the individual found deep satisfaction in identifying himself with the group”. 24

Marxian-Smithian Debate

Most recent debates on the origins of Northern capitalism have shifted from issues of Puritanism and the frontier to focus on what we might, for better or worse, call “the market.” The touchstone for much of this debate is the observation by Percy Bidwell in his 1926 classic History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 and other essays that one of the chief economic characteristics of colonial agriculture was “its self-sufficiency, meaning by that term not complete isolation from commercial relations, but production, as a rule, for home consumption rather than for sale.” 25 Some scholars believe that, if Northern family farmers did tend to self-sufficiency, it was only because there was a woeful lack of markets for farm produce. Others stress that family farmers purposefully avoided the market because they saw it as a threat to their traditional way of life and the stability of their family and community relationships.

These American debates have gotten especially rancorous over the past thirty years or so, dividing historians into two warring camps. 26 One camp‑-variously labeled “market historians,” “liberals,” or “entrepreneurialists”–stress the capitalistic nature of early Americans. The other camp‑-called at different times “social historians,” “moral economy historians,” “marxists,” “pastoralists”‑-counter that early Americans were “pre-capitalist” or “non-capitalist.” 27 Although the labels change, the cast of characters tends to remain the same. 28

If we were going to look for the deeper roots of this debate, we would find it in two contrasting conceptions of capitalism that we could best label “Marxian” and “Smithian” in honor of the patron saint of each side of the debate, Karl Marx and Adam Smith. 29 The tension between Marxian and Smithian conceptions of capitalism is nothing new. Ever since Karl Marx first wrote of a particular capitalist mode of production, capitalism as an “ism” has been highly polemical. Nineteenth-century socialists used the term as a covering label to reproach the entire Western economic system. Nineteenth-century defenders of that system, like William Graham Sumner, saw things through more positive Smithian lenses in 1883:

Some men have been found to denounce and deride the modern system‑-what they call the capitalist system. The modern system is based on liberty, on contract, and on private property. It has been reached through a gradual emancipation of the mass of mankind from old bonds both to nature and to their fellow-men. Village communities, which excite the romantic admiration of some writers, were fit only for a most elementary and unorganized society. 30

At the turn of the twentieth century, capitalism was hardly a mainstream word. Only gradually‑-behind the intense promotional effort of scholars in the 1910s and 1920s like Henri Pirenne, Lujo Brentano, N. S. B. Gras, Max Weber, R. H. Tawney, John R. Commons, and especially Werner Sombart‑-did capitalism enter the general discourse. Yet, while all these scholars could agree that the term capitalism was the best way to label the modern economic system, there was no strong consensus on what they meant by capitalism. Some like Brentano, Weber, Tawney, and Sombart seconded Marx in believing capitalism at heart a mode of production. Others like Commons, Pirenne, and Gras followed Smith in giving central importance to the extension of the market. 31

The tensions were still there in 1940 when Louis Hacker published his classic The Triumph of American Capitalism. In his preface to the 1947 edition he lamented that perhaps the heavy use of the term capitalism in the earlier edition had misled readers.

By “capitalism” I did not have in mind the Marxian meaning‑-indeed, the whole book is an effort at a reply to the Marxian analysis. What I sought to indicate was that “capitalism” was what Locke, Bentham, and Adam Smith were talking about: that it gave men liberty in order to allow them to devote their labors to the achievement of social welfare. “Utilitarianism” would perhaps have been a better word; but it is an unfamiliar one here in America as a description of what nineteenth-century England also referred to as “Liberalism.” 32

Scholars today have not escaped Hacker’s conundrum. If you are going to use the word capitalism, you had better be clear in what sense‑-Marxian or Smithian‑-you intend it.

So what exactly are the differences between the two sides? Certainly they tend to focus on different aspects of capitalism. In the context of the American debate, Smithians, on the one hand, focus on the division of labor, private property, the invisible hand of the market, indices of per capita wealth, and the emergence of institutions for capital, credit, and commerce. Marxians, on the other hand, concentrate on modes of production, proletarianization, class struggle, and class consciousness. 33

But, as already noted, most of the debate in the early American North centers not on such semantic differences over what constitutes capitalism as how to explain why Northern family farmers tended toward self-sufficiency. The debate also does not revolve so much around historical facts, as a priori assumptions each side brings about the mindset of early Americans. 34

Marxians stress the precapitalist spirit, consciousness, or mentalité of early Americans. Drawing on Karl Marx’s distinction between production for use and production for exchange, Marxians stress that early Americans were primarily concerned with production for use, meeting the needs of their household. Northern family farmers were not really profit-oriented, only desiring a “respectable competency.” 35

Perhaps preferring to rely on hard behavioral evidence of household participation in commodity markets to support their claims, Smithians have nonetheless found themselves engaged more and more in discussions of mentalité. Drawing inspiration from Adam Smith’s notions of “a certain propensity in human nature…to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” and “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,” Smithians claim, in stark contrast to Marxians, that early Americans were driven by a capitalist, commercial, entrepreneurial, liberal, or market mentalité, quite at odds with the relatively static conception of a competency. 36

Early American South

If the image of the Yankee has dominated interpretations of the origins of capitalism in the early American North, the literature on the South has been pervaded by the Yankee’s antebellum antithesis, the Cavalier. As sectional tensions increased in the years before the Civil War, Southerners and Northerners alike began to conceive of themselves as two distinct civilizations: a Puritan-Yankee North and a Cavalier South. Antebellum Americans, by mutual consent, believed Northerners and Southerners were not just possessed of different cultures in the modern sense, but were distinct races. Northerners traced their roots to original Anglo-Saxon blood surging through Puritan Roundheads while Southerners believed themselves the progeny of the Norman conquerors of medieval England through their descendants, the Royalist defenders of Charles I. According to this antebellum tradition, with such different heritages, both sections set about creating distinct societies, each dominated by a different spirit: capitalistic in the North and aristocratic in the South. 37 Max Weber drew heavily upon this tradition in confirming his belief that New England Puritanism had provided the key to Yankee capitalism. 38

Although the racial theories have been discarded over the years, a Cavalier interpretation of the mindset of the earliest Southerners‑-the settlers of Virginia in the seventeenth-century Virginia‑-has been perpetuated by historians like Philip A. Bruce, Louis B. Wright, Richard Beale Davis, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and David Hackett Fischer. These historians stress the dominance of a rural gentry ideal–or what Fischer calls the “Cavalier ethic”–in shaping colonial Virginia society. 39 For these early Virginians, engaged in the idealist pursuit of gentility, the “honor of a gentleman” comprised “that quality which was the very mainspring of his actions.” 40 “The pattern of life,” Wright observes, “which the ruling class of Virginia planters sought to follow was an ancient heritage dependent upon the possession of land, with sufficient income to maintain one’s position with dignity and honor.” Even acquisitiveness and luxury reflected the desire for the appropriate accoutrements of one’s station. 41 In addition, the ideal comprised such elements as the Renaissance spirit of adventure, religiosity, hedonism, a desire for material security, and an overall emphasis on the Aristotelian golden mean‑-a balance or equilibrium among all these diverse elements not allowing any single aspect to obliterate other aspects of a genteel life. 42

A Home-Grown Planter Aristocracy

This Cavalier tradition came under assault in the early part of the twentieth century beginning with the work of Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker. Wertenbaker challenged the entire notion of a Cavalier ethos in seventeenth-century Virginia, emphasizing that most of the earliest planters were from merchant families and were far more interested in commerce than gentility. These earliest merchant-planters, according to Wertenbaker, were essentially Virginia Yankees: voracious devourers of labor‑-importing ever-increasing numbers of indentured servants and slaves‑-in a limitless search for ever greater profits from tobacco rather than the leisure of an English landed estate. Reflecting the strong influence of Social Darwinism, Wertenbaker also emphasized the transmuting impact of the New World environment on the Virginia middle class. Both the abundance and harshness of life on the seventeenth-century Virginia frontier–ruled, as it was, by “the law of the survival of the fittest”–established that success for early Virginians owed more to “rough qualities of manhood that fitted them for the life in the forests of the New World, than to education or culture.” 43

But Wertenbaker’s challenge to the Cavalier tradition was a limited one because he believed that the planter aristocracy‑-albeit a home-grown version‑-did come to dominate Virginia society in the eighteenth century. Changing environmental conditions, in Wertenbaker’s view, transformed merchant-planters from “practical business men” dominated by “the mercantile instinct” into “idealistic and chivalrous aristocrats.” 44 In particular, Wertenbaker highlighted the role in this process of tobacco culture, the entrenchment of African slavery, the subsequent demise of the Virginia yeomanry, the overseer system, the accumulation of wealth, and the rise of isolated plantations. 45

Wertenbaker’s thesis as incorporated into the Progressive and later syntheses, would prove the most popular of the modified Cavalier interpretations of the South. According to this general consensus, the seventeenth-century Chesapeake shows what happens when entrepreneurial seventeenth-century Englishmen were free to behave as they were wont, unfettered by traditions and institutions that hampered their ability to pursue wealth. 46 The abundance of resources and cheap land, the removal of traditional constraints, and the very ruggedness of the frontier pitted Virginian against Virginian in a Darwinian struggle for survival, status, power, and wealth, unleashing a “buccaneering capitalism,” an “unopposed capitalism” as all men fiercely competed for the factors of production in pursuit of the “main chance,” which in seventeenth-century Virginia generally meant maximizing tobacco production. 47 So dominant is this interpretation of seventeenth-century Virginia that even historians who stress the Cavalier mentality of these planters concede that gentility was an unrealistic goal on the seventeenth-century frontier until they had sufficient wealth to support the lifestyle of a gentleman. Thus the immediate goal was to maximize capital accumulation in order to buy servants and land with the hope and expectation of achieving a future gentility. 48 For their part Marxians, who make such a strong case for defending everybody else in early America as pre-capitalists, offer no defense for seventeenth-century tobacco planters. 49

According to this Wertenbaker-inspired consensus, over the course of the eighteenth century, an aristocratic society emerged in Virginia, the result of the end of the frontier, the emergence of a creole elite, and most especially, the shift to slave labor. Slavery generated the wealth needed to permit planters the material symbols of their status and the leisure to pursue the genteel life. 50 Later scholars have, however, placed greater emphasis than Wertenbaker on the influence of eighteenth-century cultural contacts with England as Virginia planters, increasingly sensitive to criticism and ridicule over their provincialism, turned to the English gentry for guidance in matters of status and gentility and emulated changing European fashions. 51 More recent scholars have also stressed more than Wertenbaker the emergence of a hedonistic “Tuckahoe” culture‑-built around leisure, luxury, sport, horses, sociability, and chivalry‑-did not completely destroy the earlier commercially-oriented, hard-working spirit. Rather, the transformation was a bit more subtle, what Martin H. Quitt aptly characterizes as the shift from seventeenth-century “merchant-planters” to eighteenth-century “planter-merchants.” 52

The Continuing Saga of the Southern Frontier

Other scholars have further modified the Cavalier tradition in suggesting that the impact of the frontier did not end with seventeenth-century Virginia. Indeed what Wertenbaker found in colonial Virginia was repeated again and again as successive waves of ambitious frontier parvenus gave way to Southern aristocrats settled on their slave plantations. This framework includes scholars as diverse as Avery O. Craven, W. J. Cash, and Eugene D. Genovese. 53

Here we might fruitfully focus on the work of Eugene D. Genovese which has so centrally shaped present-day debates about the political economy of the antebellum South. Although avowedly profering a Marxian perspective, Genovese’s framework fits only awkwardly within Marxian analyses of the early American North. While best known for highlighting the pre-capitalist nature of the antebellum Southern planter mindset, Genovese actually argues neither that all slaveholders shared a pre-capitalist mindset nor that early Americans in general were pre-capitalist. Rather his framework traces a continuum in the South from “Southern Yankees” (Southerners who acted for all the world like Northern Yankee capitalists) and “frontier parvenus” at one extreme to the most paternalist of planter aristocrats at the other. Genovese stresses that one should not exaggerate the differences between the parvenu and the gentleman. “Only in their crudeness and naked avarice did they [the frontier parvenu] differ from the Virginia gentlemen.” 54 Indeed throughout the history of the slaveholding regime, there was always a constant tension between “the patriarchalism of the plantation community, and the commercial and capitalistic exploitation demanded by the exigencies of the world market.” 55

For Genovese, the history of the Old South is, as it was for W. J. Cash, “mainly the history of the roll of frontier upon frontier‑-and on to the frontier beyond.” 56 On each frontier, the same transition from capitalist to pre-capitalist, plebeian to patrician, was recapitulated. 57 But acquisition brought accumulation, and accumulation in turn brought the desire for refinement. With the passing of the frontier, Southern Yankees and frontier parvenus aspired to become gentlemen in the best Virginian tradition (in a process akin to earlier Anglicization). Finally, for Genovese as for Wertenbaker, it would be the slave plantation regime that solidified the aristocratic ideal. 58

Capitalists All!

Against all the various Cavalier interpretations of the Southern plantation economy, Smithians since the 1950s have mounted a substantial challenge. Although the debate has been pretty much a one-sided affair with regard to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake‑-where the Cavalier had already succumbed by the 1920s‑-the debates have been a bit more intense over the antebellum South. 59

Beginning with the classic work of Lewis Cecil Gray in the 1920s and 1930s, Smithians have been making a strong case for planter capitalism. For Gray, “the [plantation] system represented a capitalistic type of agricultural development, since the value of slaves, land, and equipment necessitated the investment of money capital, often of large amount and frequently borrowed, and there was a strong tendency for the planter to assume the attitude of the business man in testing success by a ratio of net money income to capital invested.” 60

This Smithian tradition was carried forward with gusto by Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins in the 1950s, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in the 1970s and 1980s, and James Oakes in the 1980s and 1990s. 61 Fogel and Engerman concluded in Time on the Cross that “there is considerable evidence that slaveowners were hard, calculating businessmen who priced slaves, and their other assets, with as much shrewdness as could be expected of any northern capitalist.” They acknowledged “patriarchal features” embodied in the master-slave relationship but stressed

paternalism is not intrinsically antagonistic to capitalist enterprise. Nor is it necessarily a barrier to profit maximization. Such well-known and spectacularly profitable firms as the International Business Machines Corporation and Eastman Kodak practice paternalism. Their experience suggests that patriarchal commitments may actually raise profits by inducing labor to be more efficient than it would have been under a less benevolent management. 62

Capitalism and Profit Maximization

This overview of approaches to the study of the origins of capitalism in America should not make us confident that any synthesis is in the offing. All sides at some level seem to rest their arguments on their own a priori assumptions about the mindset of early Americans, North and South. Even if some Marxians might agree that certain early Americans were capitalists, it would not be based on Smithian logic. And nothing Marxians raised would cause Smithians to shift their position. All sides believe you know a capitalist when you see one, yet they see the world through different lenses. It seems none of the camps could provide any evidence that could dissuade the other, each preferring non-falsifiable arguments that rest ultimately on indentifying a certain je ne sais quoi that one accepts on faith. We are at an impasse.

Yet I would suggest there are ways to move beyond this impasse. For example, we could focus our attention on a frequently implicit, sometimes explicit assumption in all the debates discussed above that capitalist men and women maximize (wealth, income and/or profits) and pre-capitalist men and women do not. However a priori such assumptions about maximizing are, surely they are far more testable than assumptions about mindsets.

Furthermore, the link between capitalism and maximizing has very long roots. When historians argue about the capitalist maximizing or precapitalist non-maximizing nature of early Americans, they are engaging in a debate that dates back to Aristotle. The dichotomy was laid out by Aristotle in contrasting two economic ethics: oikonomike (“the art of household management,” or domestic economy) and chrematistike (“the art of wealth-getting,” or chrematistics). Aristotle saw the two ethics as radically different approaches to acquisition. Whereas domestic economy limits acquisition to “the amount of property which is needed for a good life” and “the satisfaction of men’s natural wants”–“the elements of true riches”–under chrematistics “riches and property have no limit.” Domestic economy seeks to maximize leisure within the context of a good life with wealth limited to a competency according to one status in society, while chrematistics seeks to maximize wealth without limit. Aristotle, like his contemporaries and many later writers influenced directly or indirectly by classical thought, condemned chrematistics as unnatural and illegitimate. 63

Aristotle also highlighted the difference between use values and exchange values:

Of everything which we possess there are two uses: both belong to the thing as such, but not in the same manner, for one is the proper, and the other the improper or secondary use of it. For example, a shoe is used for wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe. 64

Exchange emerged naturally enough in the early days of society as people traded what they had too much of for what they had not enough of. But, for Aristotle, chrematistike was not “natural” because people continued “to exchange when they had enough.” It could only have arisen with the introduction of money into society. Until there was money, there was no reason to accumulate wealth. 65

At first money may have simply facilitated a basic barter system. But trade “became more complicated as soon as men learned by experience whence and by what exchanges the greatest profit might be made” and “how they may be accumulated.” 66

Hence some persons are led to believe that getting wealth is the object of household management, and the whole idea of their lives is that they ought either to increase their money without limit, or at any rate not lose it. 67

From Aristotle to Marx

The Aristotelian dichotomy between oikonomike and chrematistike ‑- which Karl Polanyi labeled “probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of social science”‑-had a tremendous impact on all later discussions of the rise of capitalism beginning most emphatically with Karl Marx. 68 “For Marx,” William James Booth observes, “economic formations could be divided into two grand types according to their governing ends: economies producing use values or consumption goods broadly understood, and those in which the economy is driven by the (unlimited) search after surplus value or profit.” 69 Capitalism came with the shift from production for use inherently limited by needs to infinitely expansive production for exchange.

Marx schematizes production for use as C-M-C, “the transformation of commodities into money and the re-conversion of money into commodities: selling in order to buy.” The shorthand formula for production for exchange is M-C-M’, “the transformation of money into commodities, and the re-conversion of commodities into [more] money,” “buying in order to sell dearer.” The M in C-M-C is “mere money,” while the M in M‑C‑M’ is “capital.” Only M-C-M’ generates the “surplus value” (δM = M’- M) at the heart of any transition to capitalism. As Marx himself puts it:

The simple circulation of commodities [C‑M‑C]‑‑selling in order to buy‑‑is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use‑values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital [M-C-M’] is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.

Marx makes clear that this “limitless” maximizing movement of capital applied as much to industrial capital as to merchants’ capital and is, indeed, “the general formula for capital.” 70

In similar maximizing terms, Marx goes on to define the capitalist in anthropomorphic terms as “capital personified”:

As the conscious bearer [Träger] of this movement [of capital], the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing‑‑the valorization of value‑‑is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use‑values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit‑making. This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation. 71

There is no mystery where Marx’s inspiration for this antithesis between C-M-C and M-C-M’ comes from. To explain the limitless movement of capital, Marx explicitly turns to Aristotle’s contrast between oikonomike and chrematistike. 72 Marx summarizes and expounds on Aristotle’s argument thus:

Aristotle contrasts economics with ‘chrematistics’. He starts with economics. So far as it is the art of acquisition, it is limited to procuring the articles necessary to existence and useful either to a household or the state’ contrasted with ‘chrematisitcs’ with ‘no limits to riches and property’. . . With the discovery of money, barter of necessity. . . in contradiction with its original tendency, grew into chrematistics, the art of making money transformed barter of necessity into trading in commodities which grew into chrematistics, the art of making money. . . ‘Economics, unlike chrematistics, has a limit’. 73

To his historicization of Aristotelian concepts, Marx added one more key ingredient crucial to defining capitalism as an ism: the idea of the irrepressible force, a Darwinian struggle that relentlessly pushes men under the capitalist mode of production, regardless of the precapitalist or capitalist nature of the individuals. In a letter to Engels, Marx observes:

It is remarkable how Darwin has discerned anew among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, elucidation of new markets, ‘discoveries’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’ bellum omnia contra omnes [war of all against all], and it reminds me of Hegel’s Phenomenology, wherein bourgeois society figures as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom,’ while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as bourgeois society. 74

Or, as he phrases this idea in Capital: “Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.” 75 “The division of labor within society [becomes] an a posteriori necessity imposed by nature, controlling the unregulated caprice of the producers.” 76 The capitalist

shares with the miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It impels hims to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation. 77

Later Marxians carried on this focus on maximization as central to capitalism. 78Shifting focus to the superstructural elements of capitalism, Sombart along with Weber stressed the shift from Bedarfsdeckungsprinzip (“the principle of satisfaction of relatively fixed needs”) to Erwerbsprinzip (“the principle of unlimited acquisition”). 79 Yet, for Weber as for Marx, capitalism, once ensconced, became its own driving force in a Darwinian struggle, an external coercive force compelling individuals to comply with its maximizing rules.

The capitalist economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. Thus the capitalism of to‑day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. 80

Were Early Americans Profit Maximizers?

This Aristotelian dichotomy between homo oeconomicus and homo chrematisticus, so central to the historical evolution of modern conceptions of capitalism, quite naturally continues to play a role in present debates about the transition to capitalism in early America. This is most explicit in the Marxian emphasis on needs and competency as characterizing the goals of early Americans in contrast to the later profit-maximizing under capitalism. “Because the pursuit of comfortable independence was tied,” discerns Daniel Vickers, “not to a logic of profit without end, but to the limited human needs of individual families, it plainly differed from later periods dominated by industrial capital.” 81 Other Marxians, like William L. Barney, note early American society, North and South, was itself divided between pre-capitalist yeomen, artisans, and shopkeepers pursuing the traditional goal of a competency and capitalist farmers, industrialists, and merchants following the goal of “ever-increasing wealth,” practicing “careful, planned farm strategies aimed at maximizing income by seizing upon market opportunities” in “a seemingly endless desire to improve his farm and capital assets.” 82

Some scholars take a more Marxian-cum-Darwinian approach to the issue of maximization when they suggest that the capitalist world economy forced even non-capitalists to maximize production. Mary P. Ryan notes how “the imperatives of maximizing individual gain in a competitive market” overwhelmed the family economy in the antebellum North. 83

Marxians also perpetuate the dichotomy in their regular accusations that Smithians inappropriately assume early Americans were profit maximizers. 84 Smithians, for their part, resist attempts to frame early Americans in such dichotomous Marxian terms. Some Smithians deny that they claim early Americans were consistently profit maximizers. Although James T. Lemon stresses “the ‘liberal’ middle-class orientation of many of the settlers” in eighteenth-century Southeastern Pennsylvania, he adds “this is not to say that the settlers were ‘economic men,’ single-minded maximizing materialists. Few could be, or even wanted to be.” 85 Others Smithians accuse Marxians of creating a strawman argument. To quote Winifred Rothenberg:

The implication that there was ever a time, then or now, when ‘a whole-hearted commitment to profit maximization’ had any constituency at all, let alone an unlimited one, is simply caricature. More important, households in economic theory are not assumed to be profit maximizers at all, but utility maximizers. 86

Here Rothenberg turns to neoclassical economic theory. In neoclassical economic theory, to speak of households maximizing profits simply does not make much sense. Rather households, whether in early or modern America, maximize what economists call “utility,” which at the very least recognizes a constant trade-offs between choosing more leisure and more income. 87 A few Smithians, working with a basically neoclassical economic framework, note the limitations of risk and uncertainty in constraining profit maximization on early American farms. As economist Gavin Wright states the case for the antebellum Cotton South, farmers “well knew that the results of their decisions were highly uncertain, and in the context of uncertainty, only a fool or a rich man could safely maximize expected profits.” 88

Yet for at least some Smithians the accusation that they assume early Americans were income/wealth/profit maximizers is a fair one. This is especially true of the economists. Surely economist Wright is correct when he observes that among “the working presuppositions that economists typically bring” to the study of early American history is the assumption “that profit maximization is a reasonable approximation to the principle governing the behavior of firms and farms in history.” 89 Historians, when presuming modern or capitalist behavior, are not immune to such assumptions of income-maximizing. We have already seen how historians of all stripes accept that seventeenth-century Virginia planters in an era of “unopposed capitalism” maximized tobacco production, labor output, and capital accumulation. 90 Even Rothenberg, when pushed to define capitalism, opts for “Max Weber’s usable definition of a ‘rational capitalistic enterprise’ as one that keeps accounts not just as a record of debt, but as a tool of profit-maximization.” 91

The Challenge

As was the case in debates over the mindset of early Americans, debates over the more testable assumptions of maximization could possibly lead to a stalemate. If Smithians retreat to the safer theoretical position of neoclassical assumptions of utility maximization or hedge their bets by stressing the importance of risk and uncertainty in decision making, then it may be difficult to bring the opposing sides to the table.

Yet there is at least one type of theoretically conceivable type of behavior that I believe could smoke out the Smithians and at the same time prove troublesome enough for the Marxians that it could force both sides to reconsider their positions and move closer to a middle ground. Imagine a farmer who produces a staple commodity for the market, selling the commodity in exchange for money with which he purchases all of his other needs and wants. Would you say exchange values dominate? Or is it still unclear?

Now suppose that when the market price of his staple goes down, the farmer produces more of that staple. Furthermore, when the market price of his staple goes up, the farmer produce less. Would you say use values dominate? Or does this muddle things up a bit?

Could such behavior possibly be capitalistic? It certainly is not profit-maximizing. At this point, Smithians might fall back on neoclassical economic theory and claim the farmer was simple maximizing utility‑-with its inherent trade-offs between more leisure and more income‑-rather than profits. Yet neoclassical economists themselves regularly label such behavior “perverse” showing that they, in practice, equate utility maximization with income/wealth/profit maximization.

One might suppose that what appears perverse to a Smithian might be just the kind of evidence that a Marxian might be looking for. Indeed, as Max Weber observed long ago, what better evidence of the pre-capitalist traditional behavior could one find:

A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of this leading trait of pre‑capitalistic labour. And to‑day it encounters it the more, the more backward (from a capitalistic point of view) the labouring forces are with which it has to deal. 92

Nevertheless, for their part, historians of early America have never looked for such behavior as evidence of pre-capitalist production for use. Then as now, such perverse behavior draws up too many negative images of backward peasants rather than more positive, romantic images of some pre-capitalist world we have lost, and thus proves as problematic for Marxians as Smithians. However much Marxians and Smithians might disagree on the value system of early Americans, they can surely agree that yeoman farmers and slaveholding planters, whether they were industriously pursuing production for use or exchange, were hardly lazy peasants.

And yet, as the next chapter will show, that is exactly the way that Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia behaved. Yes, seventeenth-century Virginians, those very Americans that both Smithians and Marxians have voted most likely to be maximizers.

Cite this article as: Baird, Bruce C. "The Origins of American Capitalism." Dr. Baird Online. July 8, 2017. Web. May 7, 2024. <https://www.drbairdonline.com/necessity-the-perpetual-mother/the-origins-of-american-capitalism/>.

Notes:

  1. Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man, trans. M. Epstein (1915; New York: Howard Fertig, 1967) 151-2, 301-2, quote p. 151. On Sombart’s influence in the slow but eventual triumph of the Marxian concept of “capitalism,” see Werner Sombart, “Capitalism,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman, 15 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1930) 3: 195; Ephraim Fischoff, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The History of a Controversy,” Social Research 11 (1944): 61; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 5 vols. (New York: Viking, 1946-59) 3: 345. ↩
  2. Sombart, Quintessence of Capitalism 302. ↩
  3. Sombart, Quintessence of Capitalism 389n398. For similar comments by nineteenth-century observers, see Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante‑Bellum Economy (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1965) 197-8; Grady McWhiney, Southerners and Other Americans (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 17. ↩
  4. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper, 1961) 21, 47-8, 108-9; Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) 12-3. ↩
  5. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1930) 2: 54; Thomas P. Govan, “Was the Old South Different?,” Journal of Southern History 21 (1955): 447. ↩
  6. Gabriel Kolko, “Max Weber on America: Theory and Evidence,” History and Theory 1 (1961): 243-60. ↩
  7. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958) 48. ↩
  8. Weber, Protestant Ethic 53. ↩
  9. Weber, Protestant Ethic 53‑4. ↩
  10. Weber, Protestant Ethic 55. ↩
  11. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vols. (1927; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) 3‑8, quote p. 7; A. Whitney Griswold, “Three Puritans on Prosperity,” New England Quarterly 7 (1934): 475-93; Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York: Knopf, 1948) 188; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) 40-52. ↩
  12. Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935) 199-200; Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 24 (1967) 3-8; Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1970) 1, 6, 15n. For the latest American incarnation of the Weberian argument, see Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). ↩
  13. See, e.g., Clive Day, “Capitalistic and Socialistic Tendencies in the Puritan Colonies,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1920 (Washington: GPO, 1925) 223-35; E. A. J. Johnson, American Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century (London: King, 1932) 6-8, 86-100; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 4 vols. (New York: Viking, 1946-49) 1: 29-74; Kurt Samuels­son, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber, trans. E. Geoffrey French (New York: Harper, 1961) 55-79, 113-5; Gabriel Kolko, “Max Weber on America: Theory and Evidence,” History and Theory 1 (1961): 246; Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861: An Essay in Social Causation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968); Page Smith, As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966) 189-90; J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 60-3, 83-5; John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) 1‑4. R. H. Tawney finds Weber’s interpretation less applicable to colonial New England, noting the strong parallel between New England and Calvin’s Geneva rather than the individualistic tendencies of Calvin’s influence on England. See R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926) 127-31. Problematically for supporters of Weber, historians have also closely linked a secularized Puritanism to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century republicanism with its antithetical attitude toward capitalism. See, e.g., Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969) 418; Robert E. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 29 (1972): 63, 68-9; Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 39 (1982): 350-1. Some historians in contrasting colonial New England and Virginia stress the lack of some New England institution (e.g., corporate community, Puritan ministers) that gave much freer play to environmental forces in Virginia. See, e.g., Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; New York: Holt, 1962) 65, 73-4, 125, 347; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965) 22, 279; Page Smith, As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966) 12-3; Darrett B. Rutman, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970) 47-51. ↩
  14. Stephen Aron, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Transition to Capitalism,” History Teacher 27 (1994): 270. ↩
  15. Turner, Frontier in American History 203, 211-2, 258, 305-7, 317-8, 320. ↩
  16. Turner, Frontier in American History 212-3. See further Turner, Frontier in American History 30, 32, 37, 77-8, 107, 153-5, 203, 209-13, 258-65, 270-3, 279-81, 302-9, 318-21, 348-9. In the emphasis on a break with the cake of custom, Turner’s theory shares much in common with Werner Sombart’s theory about the importance of migrants or colonists in the transition to modern capitalism. See Sombart, Quintessence of Capitalism 292-307. ↩
  17. Turner, Frontier in American History 212. ↩
  18. Turner, Frontier in American History 211. ↩
  19. Turner, Frontier in American History 78, 153 (quote), 212, 271-2. ↩
  20. Turner, Frontier in American History 258, 264-5. ↩
  21. Turner, Frontier in American History 154-5. ↩
  22. Turner, Frontier in American History 154-5, 279-80, 305-6, 318-9. ↩
  23. For colonial New England, see Parrington, Main Currents 1: 3-7; Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston 21-40, 90-7, 143; John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) 3-4. For America in general, see Arthur Meier Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922) 33-4; Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers (New York: Reynal, 1934) 269-87; J. A. Burkhart, “The Turner Thesis: A Historian’s Controversy,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 31 (1947): 79-80; Warren I. Susman, “The Useless Past: American Intellectuals and the Frontier Thesis: 1910-1930,” Bucknell Review 11 (1963): 1-20; Steven Kesselman, “The Frontier Thesis and the Great Depression,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968): 253-68; Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968) 87-9, 141-2, 144, 473; Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1981) 10; David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993) 78-85, 98-111, 127-42. A corollary of the frontier thesis not really stressed by Turner is the “pre-selective” nature of migration, with America or the frontier attracting only the most ambitious, individualistic, and acquisitive men and women. See Schlesinger, New Viewpoints 33, 37; Robert F. Berk­hofer, Jr., “Space, Time, Culture and the New Frontier,” Agricultural History 38 (1964): 26-7; Darrett B. Rutman, The Morning of America, 1603‑1789 (Boston: Houghton, 1971) 42-3, 47, 52; Richard Hofstader, America at 1750, 64-5; Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983) 179-80; Stephen Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision: Work and Labor in Early America,” Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 11-13. Such a pre-selective emphasis is usually combined with an emphasis on the interaction between the ambitious, acquisitive nature of the immigrants and the unlimited opportunities of the New World frontier. Werner Sombart stressed the central role that migrants or colonists in general played in the transition to modern capitalism around the world, but his hypothesis has had only a quite limited impact on the American debates. See Sombart, Quintessence of Capitalism 292-307; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, 1955) 52. ↩
  24. Mody C. Boatright, “The Myth of Frontier Individualism,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 22 (1941): 15-18. The communitarian version goes back at least to Aristotle’s espousal of the social nature of man in rejection of the atomistic theories of the pre-Socratics and in more recent times has flourished among Reform Darwinists, New Deal advocates, substantivist anthropologists, and Thompsonian Marxist historians. See, e.g., Wallace, New Frontiers 274-6; Charles A. Beard, “Turner’s ‘The Frontier in American History,'” The Books That Changed Our Minds, eds. Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970) 69-70; Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. George Dalton (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1968) 59-77; Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopianism in Colonial America,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 483-4, 500-22; William A. Galston, “Liberal Virtue,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 1277-90; Darrett B. Rutman, Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600-1850 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994) 34-40, 287-304. That Turner himself recognized the importance of frontier cooperation especially in New England and the North (although never fully reconciling with his overall Hobbesian-Darwinian framework), see Turner, Frontier in American History 65, 125, 257-8, 277, 342-4, 347, 358. ↩
  25. Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (1926; New York: Peter Smith, 1941) 115. ↩
  26. For recent overviews of these issues, see Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 46 (1989): 120-44; Michael Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 52 (1995): 315-26; Paul A. Gilje, ed., “Special Issue on Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 159-308. ↩
  27. Edwin G. Burrows, “The Transition Question in Early American History: A Checklist of Recent Books, Articles, and Dissertations,” Radical History Review 18 (1978): 173-90; Robert E. Mutch, “Colonial America and the Debate About Transition to Capitalism,” Theory and Society 9 (1980): 847-63; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 295-308; Kulikoff, “Transition to Capitalism” 122-32; Edwin J. Perkins, “The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Colonial America: The Foundation of Modern Business History,” Business History Review 63 (1989): 160-86; Thomas S. Wermuth, “Were Early Americans Capitalists: An Overview of the Development of Capitalist Values and Beliefs in Early America,” Mid-America 74 (1992): 85-97; Gordon S. Wood, “The Enemy is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 293-308. For a similar debate in economic anthropology between so-called “formalists” and “substantivists,” see Edward E. LeClair, Jr. and Harold K. Schneider, Economic Anthropology: Readings in Theory and Analysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968). ↩
  28. Typically lumped with the “social historians” are scholars like Michael Merrill, Christopher Clark, James A. Henretta, Robert E. Mutch, Rona S. Weiss, Jonathan Prude, Robert A. Gross, and Allan Kulikoff; with the “market historians,” Stuart Bruchey, James T. Lemon, Winifred Rothenberg, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, Carville Earle, Diane Lindstrom, Carole Shammas, Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, Edwin J. Perkins, and Joyce Appleby. Of course, like any exercise in lumping, individual scholars might not fit neatly into such categories. For example, Percy Bidwell himself provides evidence for both interpretations. Cf. Percy W. Bidwell, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” American Historical Review 26 (1921): 683-6; Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture 82-3, 131. Obviously there is some overlap between this debate and the debates already discussed. In general, Weberians and Turnerians tend to side with the Smithians, while scholars who are both anti-Turnerian and anti-Weberian tend to be more in line with the Marxians. ↩
  29. Marxians are usually more explicit in their recognition of the historical roots of the debate. For Marxian emphasis on Marx’s influence, see Michael Merrill, “Cash is Good to Eat: Self-sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 4 (1977): 46-56, 64; Robert E. Mutch, “Yeoman and Merchant in Pre-industrial America: Eighteenth-century Massachusetts as a Cast Study,” Societas 7 (1977): 290, 295-6; Mutch, “Colonial America” 852-60; Rona S. Weiss, “Primitive Accumulation in the United States: The Interaction between Capitalist and Noncapitalist Class Relations in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Economic History 42 (1982): 77-82; Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) 2. For examples of Marxian emphasis on the Smith’s influence, see Merill, “Cash is Good to Eat” 43-4; Mutch, “Colonial America” 850; Michael A. Bernstein and Sean Wilentz, “Marketing, Commerce, and Capitalism in Rural Massachusetts,” Journal of Economic History 44 (1984): 172; Kulikoff, “Transition to Capitalism” 124; Michael Merrill, “The Anticapitalist Origins of the United States,” Review 13 (1990): 465, 470. ↩
  30. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Others (1883; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911) 63-4. ↩
  31. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1947) 1-32; Henrietta M. Larson, Guide to Business History: Materials for the Study of American Business History and Suggestions for Their Use (1948; Boston: J. S. Canner, 1964) 34-43. ↩
  32. Louis M. Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism: The Development of Forces in American History to the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947). ↩
  33. For an overview of Smithian “institutional” approaches to the study of the rise of capitalism, see Paul A. Gilje, “The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 159-81. Interestingly, proletarianization has not played an important role in the American debates. Since the family farm did not employ much in the way of free-wage labor, quite clearly they were not capitalistic enterprises in the strict Marxian sense, a point Marxians sometimes explicitly point out to Smithians. But in practice Marxian students of early America do not seem satisfied with defining capitalism in terms of proletarianization. Indeed, as both Marxians like Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude and Smithians like Winifred Rothenberg have observed, if capitalism is defined strictly in terms of free-wage labor, then American farmers‑-apart perhaps from some isolated cases like the “bonanza” farms on the Northern Plains and fruit producers with all their migrant workers in twentieth-century California‑-have probably never been capitalists. See Lemon 126; Merrill, “Cash is Good to Eat” 61; Rona S. Weiss, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1850: A Comment,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 476-7; Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, “Introduction,” The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, eds. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 13; Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, eds. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 28; Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Bound Prometheus,” Reviews in American History 15 (1987): 628-37; Gavin Wright, “American Agriculture and the Labor Market: What Happened to Proletarianization?,” Agricultural History 62 (1988): 182-209; Kulikoff, “Transition to Capitalism” 123; Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins 5. See also n. 59 below. ↩
  34. Both sides criticize the a priori assumptions of the other side. See, e.g., James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 35 (1978): 5, 10, 12; Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1855,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 286-7; Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Peculiar South Revisited: White Society, Culture, and Politics in the Antebellum Period, 1800-1860,” Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, eds. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 85. ↩
  35. Merrill “Cash is Good to Eat” 53, 61, 63; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 151, 217; Christopher Clark, “Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800-1860,” Journal of Social History 13 (1979): 175; Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 6-7. ↩
  36. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937) 13-14, 86, 324-6, 421, 423; Hartz, Liberal Tradition in America 89; Rothenberg “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers” 285-6, 313; Weiss, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1850: A Comment” 475. Some scholars suggest that there was a “dual economy” of sorts in colonial America, a commercially-oriented sector of seaport towns and a subsistence-oriented sector of backcountry farmers. Nevertheless, however much they might agree about the capitalist nature of the market-oriented sector, Marxians and Smithians fundamentally disagree about the basis for the subsistence orientation of the farmers. For Marxians, early Americans were self-sufficient because they saw the market as a threat. For Smithians, farmers were self-sufficient because there was no ready market. ↩
  37. John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbours, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1902) 2: 11; Francis P. Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (1924; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962) 23-4; Parrington, Main Currents 2: 28; Jay B. Hubbell, “Cavalier and Indentured Servant in Virginia Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 26 (1927): 25-7, 34-7; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1941) ix; Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950) 123-54; Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940) 43; Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 1956) 109-13, 129-30; Marshall W. Fishwick, Virginia: A New Look at the Old Dominion (New York: Harper, 1959) 110-1; Harvey Wish, The American Historian: A Social-Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) 238-9; Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 15-6; Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization 1790-1860 (New York: Harper, 1963) 2, 150; Jay B. Hubbell, South and Southwest: Literary Essays and Reminiscences (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965) 228-39; Clement Eaton, A Histo­ry of the Old South, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966) 52; David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) 177-92; Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life 1600‑1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976) 146-8; Jan C. Dawson, “The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South’s Perception of Contrasting Traditions,” Journal of Southern History 44 (1978): 597-614; Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 12-4; Jan C. Dawson, The Unusable Past: America’s Puritan Tradition, 1830 to 1930 (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1984) 61-75; Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr, The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) 7; James Tice Moore, “Of Cavaliers and Yankees: Frederick W. M. Halliday and the Sectional Crisis, 1845-1861,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1991): 351-2. ↩
  38. Weber, Protestant Ethic 55-6, 173-4. Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner’s, 1960) 51-2; C. Vann Woodward, “The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 354-6. ↩
  39. On Philip A. Bruce, see Philip A. Bruce, The Social History of Virginia. An Address Delivered at the Final Commencement, 1881, of the Onancock Academy, Virginia (n.p.: Miller School Print, 1881); Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1910; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964) 2: 605-36; Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Lynchburg, VA: Bell, 1927) 23, 109, 143, 160, 163; Bruce, rev. of The Planters of Colonial Virginia, by Thomas J. Wertenbaker, American Historical Review 28 (1923): 553; Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953) 304; Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 1956) 129‑30; Marshall W. Fishwick, Virginia: A New Look at the Old Dominion (New York: Harper, 1959) 274-5; Darrett B. Rutman, “Philip Alexander Bruce: A Divided Mind of the South,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 68 (1960): 387-407; Hugh F. Rankin, “The Colonial South,” Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography in Honor of Fletcher M. Green, eds. Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1965) 9; L. Moody Simms, “Philip Alexander Bruce: His Life and Works,” diss., University of Virginia, 1966, 192-4. On other Cavalier interpretations, see Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 2-5, 37, 63; Louis B. Wright, The British Tradition in America (Birmingham: Trustees of the Rushton Lectures, 1954) 9-10; Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955) 21-2; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585‑1763, 3 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978) 1: xxix; 2: 937-9; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) vii-viii, 65-6, 74-5; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Real and Mythical Souths,” Southern Review 24 (1988): 230-1; David Hackett Fischer, “Albion and the Critics: Further Evidence and Reflection,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 48 (1991): 287-8. See also Peter Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent in 1640,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 160-3; Peter Laslett, “Sir Robert Filmer: The Man versus the Whig Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 5 (1948): 531; Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1951) 28-32; Morris Talpalar, The Sociology of Colonial Virginia (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960) 208-9; Jay B. Hubbell, Southern Life in Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1960) 41, 44-5; Pierre Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover 1674-1744 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971) 5; Virginia Bernhard, “Poverty and the Social Order in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 141-55; Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 11, 14-5, 292n50. ↩
  40. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 4-5, 9, 35, 77, 92, 130, 178; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers (University, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1940) 17-8; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor xiii, 32-3. ↩
  41. Bruce, Social Life of Virginia 160; Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 4‑7, 75, quote 4-5. ↩
  42. Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1895; New York: Peter Smith, 1935) 2: 131-241; Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia 1: 3-289; Social Life of Virginia 12-6, 255-8; Mary N. Stanard, Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1917); Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 9, 35, 60, 66-9, 72-81, 92, 176; Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age (Boston: Little, 1969) 14; Richard Beale Davis, Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973) xiii-xxiv; Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1: xxix-xxi, xxxi; 2: 13, 3: 1313, 1576; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 232-6, 332-40. ↩
  43. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1910; New York: Russell, 1958) 143, 155-6, 167; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Old South: The Founding of American Civilization (1942; New York: Cooper Square, 1963) 167. Although Wertenbaker heavily criticized the unscrupulous ways of the earliest merchant-planters, he downplayed the view of many Englishmen that Virginia was settled by the dregs of England, emphasizing rather the superior genetic stock of this imported bourgeoisie compared to a degraded English aristocracy. See Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian 8n6, 9-15, 32-3n37, 60, 220; Thomas J. Werten­baker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1922; New York: Russell, 1958) 32-4. Perhaps Wertenbaker was influenced by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s sectional-frontier process, the history of the “competition of industrial units” pitting the superior slave plantation against the inferior non-slaveholding yeoman farms. Cf. Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts,” American Historical Review 11 (1906): 799-800; Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian 144-6, 210-1; Wertenbaker, Planters of Colonial Virginia iii. ↩
  44. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian 33. ↩
  45. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian 2-3, 9‑10, 16-8, 28-34, 39-60, 65-81, 90-1, 105, 132-5, 220; Wertenbaker, Old South 19-21; W. Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers 129; Fishwick, Virginia 275; Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years 1607-1763 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 83; Rankin, “Colonial South” 14-5; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 225n30, 256n12; Fischer, “Albion and the Critics” 286, 286n47. ↩
  46. A couple of scholars have attempted to fit Wertenbaker’s planters into a Weberian framework. Highlighting the Puritan elements in the literature of the Company years, Perry Miller observed in early seventeenth-century Virginia a condensed version of his New England declension, with the process of Americanization completed in Virginia before the Puritans even arrived in Massachusetts Bay. See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956) 99‑140. See also Morris Talpalar, The Sociology of Colonial Virginia (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960) 13-75. ↩
  47. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian 91-106; Carl Lotus Becker, Beginnings of the American People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915) 70, 79, 166-7; James Truslow Adams, Provincial Society 1690‑1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 210; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929; Boston: Little, 1946) 26-9, 35; Cash, Mind of the South 8; Miller, Errand into the Wilderness 4-9, 127-8, 139-40; Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (1952; New York: Atheneum, 1966) 5; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “Institutions and the Law of Slavery: The Dynamics of Unopposed Capitalism,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 3-21; Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” Seventeenth‑Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959) 95; Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) 43; Eaton, History of the Old South 52-3, 69; David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Sigmund Diamond, “Values as Obstacles to Economic Growth: The American Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 27 (1967): 561-75; Edmund S. Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 169-98; Edmund S. Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 595-611; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Populations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975) 223-5, 276; Brown, Modernization 40-4; Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 10-5; Martin H. Quitt, “Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 45 (1988) 638-9; Darrett B. Rutman, Small Worlds, Large Questions xiii. ↩
  48. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian 91-106; J. Adams, Provincial Society 210; Wright, Middle-Class Culture 185; Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 43-7, 51, 63-4, 71, 95; Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier 43; Clifford Dowdey, The Great Plantation: A Profile of Berkeley Hundred and Plantation Virginia from Jamestown to Appomattox (New York: Bonanza, 1957) 75; Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities 5; Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure” 94-5; Eaton, History of the Old South 52-3, 69; Carole Shammas, “English‑Born and Creole Elites in Turn‑of‑the‑Century Virginia,” The Chesa­peake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo‑American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) 278-80; Quitt, “Immigrant Origins” 642-5; Bernhard, “Poverty and the Social Order” 141-55; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor 73-4. ↩
  49. Marxians also cannot so ably make a case for the special pre-capitalist nature of the Southern slaveholding household in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, not when the dominant form of labor was indentured servitude. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese admits, “the relation between indentured servants and their masters, as in the Chesapeake, may plausibly be interpreted as a special and qualified case of the wage relation.” See Elizabeth Fox‑Genovese “Antebellum Southern Households: A New Perspective on a Familiar Question,” Review 7 (1983): 226. See also David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ↩
  50. Fiske, Old Virginia 219; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918; New York: D. Appleton, 1928) 397‑8; Wertenbaker, Planters of Colonial Virginia 154‑5; Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 45-6, 51, 63, 71; Wright, Atlantic Frontier 70, 93; J. Adams, Provincial Society 210-2; Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964) 43-4, 64; C. Vann Woodward, “The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 360; Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 78-9; R. Gray, Writing the South 12; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 37-63, 165-204; Stuart Bruchey, “Economy and Society in an Earlier America,” Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 304-5; Anita H. Rutman, “Still Planting the Seeds of Hope: The Recent Literature of the Early Chesapeake Region,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1987): 15-6; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness 93, 97; Quitt, “Immigrant Origins” 631, 648-55. ↩
  51. J. Adams, Provincial Society 211-2; Cash, Mind of the South 8; Hartz, Liberal Tradition in America 52; Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier 43; Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, 1959) 3-22; Hugh F. Rankin, “The Colonial South,” Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography in Honor of Fletcher M. Green, eds. Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1965) 6; Bruchey, Roots of American Economic Growth 38-9; Eaton, Growth of Southern Civilization 1-3; Ronald L. Davis, “Culture on the Frontier,” Southwest Review 53 (1968): 387-91; Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” Journal of Social History 3 (1970): 189-224; Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, ed. Richard M. Jellison (New York: Norton, 1976): 42; Shammas, “English-Born” 285-9; A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 24-34; Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 17-21; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor 88; R. Gray, Writing the South 11-7; T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986) 496-9; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness 85; Quitt, “Immigrant Origins” 643; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 359‑60. ↩
  52. On Tuckahoe culture, see William E. Dodd, Statesmen of the Old South, or From Radicalism to Conservative Revolt (1911; New York: Book League of America, 1929) 15-6; Phillips, American Negro Slavery 324-7, 359-401; Phillips, Life and Labor 35, 40-1, 354-7, 365; Wertenbaker, Old South 164‑219; Eaton, History of the Old South 48-9; Cash, Mind of the South 4-8; Thompson, Plantation Societies 225. On the commercial orientation and industriousness of the Virginia aristocracy, see Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The First Americans 1607-1690 (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 259-60; Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia 57-9, 156n2, 157; Hartz, Liberal Tradition in America 52; Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities 13-7; Wright, Atlantic Frontier 70, 93; Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier 20; Jacob M. Price, “The French Farmers‑General in the Chesapeake: The Mackercher-Huber Mission of 1737‑1738,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 14 (1957): 152; Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure” 107; Fishwick, Virginia 32; Bruchey, Roots of American Economic Growth 40-1; Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Behavior in a Planting Society: The Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” Journal of Southern History 33 (1967): 469-85; Morgan, “Puritan Ethic” 3-43; Marambaud, William Byrd 7; Brown, Modernization 8-9; D. D. Bruce, Jr., “Play, Work, and Ethics in the Old South,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 40 (1977): 34, 46; Michael Greenberg, “William Byrd II and the World of the Market,” Southern Studies 16 (1977): 429-56; Joyce Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 68 (1982): 833-49; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 22-30; Main, Tobacco Colony 79; Michael Zuckerman, “Fate, Flux, and Good Fellowship: An Early Virginia Design for the Dilemma of American Business,” Business and Its Environment: Essays for Thomas C. Cochran, ed. Harold Issadore Sharlin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983) 161-84; R. Gray, Writing the South 12-3; R. Watson, Cavalier 46; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness 98-9; Quitt, “Immigrant Origins” 631, 648-55. ↩
  53. Avery Craven, “The ‘Turner Theories’ and the South,” Journal of Southern History 5 (1939): 291-314; Cash, Mind of the South; Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969). ↩
  54. Genovese, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965) 28-9 (quote); Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 139-43. Genovese at several points notes a similar frontier process in Brazil, contrasting the older, seigneurial Northeast and the newer, capitalist South. See Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 71-96, 138-9. The major difference between Genovese and James Oakes (who I would classify as a Smithian) seems to be a matter of which group of planters they focus on. Genovese concentrates on the more settled plantation regions while Oakes centers on the capitalistic frontier, as Oakes himself notes. Oakes’s frontier planters, reflecting their “intense devotion to the capitalistic spirit of accumulation,” are ever moving to the next frontier in “their relentless pursuit of personal prosperity,” “their incessant desire to move in search of greater opportunities to use their slaves.” See See James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982; New York: Vintage Books, 1983) xvi, 86, 191, 226-7. ↩
  55. Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 98. For other examples of the tension between the capitalist/competitive and pre-capitalist/aristocratic/patriarchal/paternalistic side of Southern slavery, see Genovese, “Slave South” 16, 18, 19. “No Marxist denies that the slaveholders functioned like ordinary capitalists in many respects. Their economic system, embedded in the world market, may be subjected to market analysis over a wide range of behavior.” See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Debate over Time on the Cross: A Critique of Bourgeois Criticism,” Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 162. On similar tensions in Oakes, see Oakes, Ruling Race xi, 6, 192. ↩
  56. Cash, Mind of the South 4. ↩
  57. Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 120-3.]/ref] The antebellum Southern frontier, like any other frontier country, “produced tough, competitive, acquisitive frontier types” with a “get-rich-quick psychology.” 93Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 98, 137-9. ↩
  58. Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 96. See also Genovese, “Slave South” 23, 29; Fox-Genovese, “Antebellum Southern Households” 227. As with the northern economy, proletarianization does not seem to be a major issue in American debates about whether the southern antebellum economy was capitalist. If capitalism was strictly defined in terms of proletarianization, as Diane Lindstrom notes, “why even debate whether the plantation economy was capitalist? The issue has been defined away.” See Diane Lindstrom, <dllindst@facstaff.wisc.edu>, Review of Paul Gilje, ed., “Special Issue on Capitalism in the Early Republic,” in H-SHEAR, <h-shear@h-net.msu.edu>, 7 March 1997, archived at <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~shear>. For instance, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who despite all their efforts to defend antebellum Southern slaveowners as pre-capitalists, have no qualms going along with a general consensus that treats absentee West Indian slaveholders as all but capitalists. See Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 11, 28-31; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 22-3; Fox‑Genovese, “Antebellum Southern Households” 223-4. Rather the main point is how slavery affected the economic mentality of the slaveholder. For an excellent overview of Marx’s own rather ambiguous view of the link between slave and free labor and capitalism, see Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters & Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 99-100. ↩
  59. For Smithian interpretations of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, see Chapter 2. ↩
  60. Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1933; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958) 1: 302. Just as in the early American North, some scholars beginning with Gray also suggest that there was a “dual economy” in the antebellum South, a commercially-oriented plantation sector of seaport towns and a subsistence-oriented sector of backcountry farmers, with Marxians (like Steven Hahn) stressing more a basis in ideological resistance and Smithians (like James Oakes) the lack of markets, with some scholars (like Gray himself and David Weiman) taking a more intermediate position. See Lewis Cecil Gray, Introduction to Agricultural Economics (New York: MacMillan Company, 1924) 12; Gray, History of Agriculture 1: 122-3; Morton Rothstein, “The Antebellum South as a Dual Economy: A Tentative Hypothesis,” Agricultural History 41 (1965): 373-82; Eugene D. Genovese, “Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders’ Democracy,” Agricultural History 49 (1975): 331-42; William L. Barney, The Passage of the Republic: An Interdisciplinary History of Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987) 28; James Oakes, “The Politics of Economic Development in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1984): 305-16; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); James Oakes, “From Republicanism to Liberalism: Ideological Change and the Crisis of the Old South,” American Quarterly 37 (1985): 551-71; David F. Weiman, “Farmers and the Market in Antebellum America: A View from the Georgia Upcountry,” Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 627-47; David F. Weiman, “Families, Farms and Rural Society in Preindustrial America,” Research in Economic History, suppl. 5 (1989): 255-77. ↩
  61. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Elkins, Slavery; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, 1974); Oakes, Ruling Race; James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). See also Thomas P. Govan, “Was the Old South Different?,” Journal of Southern History 21 (1955): 448; Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). ↩
  62. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross 1: 70-3 (quotes p.73), 129 (quote), 200, 232. See also Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) 36, 64. ↩
  63. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Modern Library, 1943) 66-70; Albert Augustus Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought (1916; Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1978) 85-8, 105-7; Lewis H. Haney, History of Economic Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1936) 63-5; M. Beer, Early British Economics from the XIIIth to the Middle of the XVIIIth Century (London: Allen, 1938) 130; Louis Schneider, The Freudian Psychology and Veblen’s Social Theory (Morningside Heights, NY: King’s Crown, 1948) 186; Walter A. Weisskopf, The Psychology of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) 12-5; Herbert Lüthy, “Once Again: Calvinism and Capitalism,” The Protestant Ethic and Modernization, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (New York: Basic, 1968) 105; Odd Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources (Bergen: Universitetforlaget, 1983) 46-55; Thomas O. Nitsch, “Further Reflections on Human-nature Assumptions in Economics–Part I: The ‘Men’ of Aristotle, Adam Smith et al. Revisited,” International Journal of Social Economics 17 (1990): 4-5; David Parker and Richard Stead, Profit and Enterprise: The Political Economy of Profit (New York: Harvester, 1991) 20-1; Paul A. Rahe, Republic Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) 88-104. ↩
  64. Aristotle, Politics 67. ↩
  65. Aristotle, Politics 67-8. ↩
  66. Aristotle, Politics 68. ↩
  67. Aristotle, Politics 69‑70. ↩
  68. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944) 53-4. ↩
  69. William James Booth, “Households, Markets, and Firms,” Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth‑century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity, ed. George E. McCarthy (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992) 244. ↩
  70. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977) 248-57, quote 253. ↩
  71. Marx, Capital 254‑5. ↩
  72. Marx, Capital 247-69, esp. 247-8, 253n, 267; Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “Marx on Aristotle: Freedom, Money, and Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980): 351-67; J. G. A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth‑Century Social Thought,” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 237; Charles Perrings, “The Natural Economy Revisited,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33 (1985): 829‑31; George E. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy (Savage, MD: Rowman, 1990) 58-9, 303-4n2; William James Booth, “The New Household Economy,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 59-75; Booth, “Households, Markets, and Firms” 243-4, 249. For reverse analysis of Aristotle in Marxian terms, see Scott Meikle, “Aristotle and the Political Economy of the Polis,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979): 57-73; S. Todd Lowry, The Archaeology of Economic Ideas: The Classic Greek Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987) 224-5, 319n39. Cf. Lindley M. Keaby, “Translator’s Preface,” The Economic Foundations of Society, by Achille Loria (London: Sonnenschein, 1910) ix. ↩
  73. Marx, Capital 253n (quote), 267. ↩
  74. Karl Marx, The Letters of Karl Marx, trans. Saul K. Padover (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1979) 157. See also Richard Wiltgen, “The Darwinian Evolutionary Perspectives of Engels and Veblen,” International Journal of Social Economics 17 (1990): 4-11. ↩
  75. Marx, Capital 381. ↩
  76. Marx, Capital 476. Cf. Marx, Capital 477, 648-51, 921. ↩
  77. Marx, Capital 739. ↩
  78. Nevertheless, not all Marxians may accept this emphasis on the distinction between C-M-C and M-C-M’ or the interpretation of that distinction offered here. For example, there was a major debate among Marxian Europeanists in the 1950s‑-the famous debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism‑-in which one side (led by Paul Sweezy) emphasized the distinction between production for use and production for exchange and the other side (led by Maurice Dobb) played it down. For Sweezy, “the crucial feature of feudalism” was that it was “a system of production for use. The needs of the community are known and production is planned and organised with a view to satisfying these needs.” Sweezy continues: “As Marx stated in Capital, ‘it is clear…that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange value but the use value of the product predominates, surplus labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus labour arises from the nature of production itself.’ There is, in other words, none of the pressure which exists under capitalism for continual improvements in methods of production.” See Paul Sweezy, “A Critique,” in Paul Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: NLB, 1976) 35. Dobb and his followers in turn tended to play down this distinction, stressing the centrality of proletarianization to the capitalist mode of production, although the major difference between the two groups centered more on means‑-whether the transition was driven by external market forces or an internal class dialectic‑-than ends. See Paul Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: NLB, 1976). The recent “Brenner debate” similarly pits an internal class dialectic against competing Malthusian and market interpretations of the rise of capitalism. See T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

    It is true that in defining the capitalist mode of production, Marx undoubtedly had in mind something akin to mid-nineteenth-century industrial England with its large factories and proletarianized labor force. “Capitalist production,” writes Marx, “only really begins…when each individual capital simultaneously employs a comparatively large number of workers, and when, as a result, the labour‑process is carried on on an extensive scale, and yields relatively large quantities of products…This is true both historically and conceptually.” See Marx, Capital 439. And, of course, he notes over and over that if the capitalist, as capital personified, is driven to create surplus-value, he does so by seeking to “absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour,” which means a proletarianized labor force. See Marx, Capital 342. See also Marx, Capital 436-7, 449, 739. Indeed, Marx often claims that only the proletarian can produce the surplus value that the capitalist converts into capital. See, e.g., Marx, Capital 742.

    But, both historically and conceptually, the shift from C-M-C to M-C-M’ is the essence of Marx’s capitalism, taking precedence over both industrialization and free-wage labor. The factories and proletarians do not drive the transition to capitalism; they merely allow the capitalist as capital personified to maximize surplus value. If we must equate capitalism with the final achievement of Marx’s capitalist mode of production, then we might as well abandon speaking of capitalism as anything but an ideal type that never has existed. Marx was not even sure in the 1860s when he was writing Capital whether England had yet achieved his capitalist mode of production. See Marx, Capital 385, 389-90. I certainly do not think that subsequent events have pushed the Western world any closer to achieving Marx’s ideal of a capitalist mode of production. But if we are to draw from Marx the essence of this thing that we call capitalism today and what makes capitalism different from other economic systems, we must concentrate primarily on what Marx had to say about the capitalist as capital personified, M-C-M’ as opposed to C-M-C, and only secondarily on the final form. ↩

  79. On Sombart and Weber, see Weber, Protestant Ethic 53, 58-9, 64-5, 195n12; Talcott Parsons, The Early Essays, ed. Charles Camic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 3-37; H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism: A Criticism of Max Weber and his School (New York: Kelley, 1959) 35-6; F. X. Sutton, “The Social and Economic Philosophy of Werner Sombart: The Sociology of Capitalism,” An Introduction to the History of Sociology, ed. Harry Elmer Barnes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 322-3, 327; John W. Baldwin, “The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 49 (1959): 5-6; Lüthy, “Once Again” 105; Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) 161; Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983) 19-21; M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 124-8. Louis Schneider believes that Thorstein Veblen’s work marks the final stage in the Aristotle-Marx-Weber historicization of the triumph of chrematistics over domestic economy. See Schneider, Freudian Psychology 186-8. ↩
  80. Weber, Protestant Ethic 17, 54-5 (quote), 67-9, 72, 181, 282n108; Gudmund Hernes, “The Logic of The Protestant Ethic,” Rationality and Society 1 (1989): 151-3. ↩
  81. Daniel Vickers, “The Transition to Capitalism in the American Northeast,” History Teacher 27 (1994): 268. See also Merrill, “Cash is Good to Eat” 43, 53, 63; Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Cul­ture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 47 (1990): 12. ↩
  82. Barney, Passage of the Republic 23 (quote), 28. See also Jonathan Prude, “Town-Factory Conflicts in Antebellum Rural Massachusetts,” The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, eds. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 75, 78. Others scholars in stressing that the goal of early Americans was a competency, meeting family needs, autonomy, or personal independence, explicitly deny that they were profit-maximizers, but leave but leave less clear the role of maximizing in either traditional pre-capitalist or modern capitalist economies. See, e.g., Miller, Errand into the Wilderness 143; Henretta, “Families and Farms” 16; Jack P. Greene, “Independence, Improvement, and Authority: Toward a Framework for Under­standing the Histories of the Southern Backcountry during the Era of the American Revolution,” An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985) 13n; Richard L. Bushman, “Family Security in the Transition from Farm to City, 1750‑1850,” Journal of Family History 6 (1981): 240; James A. Henretta, “The Transition to Capitalism in America,” The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology, eds. James A. Henretta et al. (New York: Knopf, 1991) 223. Henretta, when speaking of capitalist farmers or the capitalist transformation, tends to speak of a profit-orientation more than profit-maximization. See Henretta, “Families and Farms” 12, 18; Henretta, “Transition to Capitalism in America” 220. Although Richard D. Brown plays down the Marxian conception of capitalism in favor of modernization, he does equate a “commitment to maximizing yields through rational manipulation” with modern society. See Richard D. Brown, “Modernization: A Victorian Climax,” American Quarterly 27 (1975) 534; Brown, Modernization 43. ↩
  83. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 153. 94 For Eugene D. Genovese, however paternalistic the nature of master-slave relations, “the expansion of the world market” pushed the modern slaveholding classes “toward commercial exploitation and profit maximization.” 95Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made 3 (quote), 51-2, 98. See also Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978) 10; Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins 5; Douglas R. Egerton, “Markets without a Market Revolution: Southern Planters and Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 208, 218. ↩
  84. Mutch, “Yeoman and Merchant” 283-7; Robert E. Mutch, “Colonial America and the Debate About Transition to Capitalism,” Theory and Society 9 (1980): 849-50; Bernstein and Wilentz, “Marketing, Commerce, and Capitalism” 172; Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins 5; Nancy Osterud, “Gender and the Capitalist Transition in Rural America,” History Teacher 27 (1994): 273. ↩
  85. James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972) xv. See also James T. Lemon, “Early Americans and their Social Environment,” Journal of Historical Geography 6 (1980): 127-8; T. H. Breen, “Back to Sweat and Toil: Suggestions for the Study of Agricultural Work in Early America,” Pennsylvania History 49 (1982): 253; Bruchey, “Economy and Society” 304‑5. ↩
  86. Rothenberg, “Bound Prometheus” 633. ↩
  87. Other Smithians who emphasize utility maximizing include Edwin Perkins and John McCusker. See Perkins, “Entrepreneurial Spirit in Colonial America” 169; John J. McCusker, rev. of A Place in Time, by Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, Journal of American History 72 (1985): 129; John J. McCusker, rev. of Commerce and Culture, by Christine Leigh Heyrman, Business History Review 60 (1986) 297. A similar idea is worded perhaps a bit more awkwardly when they speak, like Percy Bidwell, of the farmer attempting “to get as good a living as he could with the least expenditure of labor,” or, like Darrett Rutman, that “they sought always a maximum of yield with a minimum of effort, abjuring maximum effort which might bring greater yield.” See Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture 131 (quote); Darrett B. Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Old Colony, 1620‑1692 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) 61. ↩
  88. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978) 62‑63. See also McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 300. ↩
  89. Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South 3. See also Faust, “The Peculiar South Revisited” 84-5. ↩
  90. In addition to citations in nn. 47-48, see as well David Klingaman, “The Significance of Grain in the Development of the Tobacco Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 276; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom 172, 295-6, 302; Brown, Modernization 43-4; Lorena Seebach Walsh, “Charles County, Maryland, 1658‑1705: A Study of Chesapeake Social and Political Structure,” diss., Michigan State University, 1977, 263, 271, 277-80, 283-5; Main, Tobacco Colony 40-2, 71; Charles Wetherell, “‘Boom and Bust’ in the Colonial Chesapeake,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1984): 209; Bruchey, “Economy and Society” 304‑5; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) xi‑xii. ↩
  91. Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers: Reply,” Journal of Economic History, 43 (1983): 480. ↩
  92. Weber, Protestant Ethic 58‑61. ↩