Reviews of Books

If farmers were, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, "the chosen people of God," they were also the most numerous group among early American populations. Recent social histories of early America have paid much attention to small farmers and their families, but broad interpretative accounts still tend to under-represent them. Allan Kulikoff, well-known for his important work on colonial slavery and the early American countryside, is working on a large study of farmers up to the end of the nineteenth century: From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers represents the first installment of this project. It does much to explain the material and cultural circumstances that made small farmers so important in colonial and early national society.	1
Kulikoff's account begins not with the European settlement of North America but with conditions in late medieval England. He argues that the folk memory of the period after the Black Death, when conditions in the English countryside were temporarily favorable for the poor and middling, provided a key to their descendants' aspirations in the New World. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, landlords gradually reasserted control over English rural society. Though some cultivators gained standing as independent "yeomen," the majority remained tenants or became wage-laborers. The memory of better times, coupled with the legacy of dispossession and poverty, created a "desire for communal rights, familial self-sufficiency, and independence" that in the seventeenth century came to be "shared by nearly all those who crossed the Atlantic" (p. 17).	2
This desire underpinned colonial settlers' concern with gaining land. Early dreams of great wealth and profits in North America rapidly faded, and the continent attracted the attentions of small, rather than large, investors, who realized that its principal resource was the land itself. The promise of access to land as a reward for labor overcame initial skepticism about the colonies' prospects and redefined America as a land of opportunity for the middling and poor, rather than for the rich. Addressing the craving for independence among the English dispossessed, early promoters were in good part responsible for projecting the myth that American land was empty, available for the taking. Subsequent migrants from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, where peasant societies were also under pressure during the early modern period, similarly became attached to the aspiration of exchanging labor for land in America.	3
Kulikoff stresses that these ambitions to own land were manifested in communal and not just individual efforts. Family patterns and circumstances, the presence or absence of kin, and religious motivations had as much influence over decisions to migrate and the means used for doing so as individual choices and ambitions. There were many variations on this theme, both from region to region and across time. Yet while their backgrounds and aspirations would shape Europeans' encounters with colonial land and societies, the new and shifting conditions they faced in North America also created dynamic, not static, social and cultural patterns. Kulikoff draws together an array of recent findings by historians to present a new, nuanced, and sophisticated account of changes in early American rural society.	. . .