Book Review

Canada and the United States

From slavery to sharecropping to mechanization, the history of agricultural labor in the American South has been debated so thoroughly and contentiously that one might believe any purportedly new interpretation would fall into one established camp or another. Ronald E. Seavoy proves this expectation wrong, and quite possibly succeeds in uniting all previous schools in opposition to him, by advancing an argument of the utmost simplicity: productivity and agricultural incomes in the South were persistently low because southerners were peasants whose primary motivation was to achieve subsistence with the minimum possible expenditure of labor. Acknowledging that other factors and motivations may at times have intruded, Seavoy invokes the principle of Occam's razor: "The general rule that best explains the privation inherent in subsistence cultivation is the minimal performance of agricultural labor" (p. 9). The book proceeds to retell all the major chapters of southern agricultural history from this vantage point, extending its reach in the last chapter to the problems of the underclass in modern American cities.

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The author's claims for his discovery are far from modest. He writes: "The assumption by U.S. scholars that southern subsistence cultivators were not peasants remained unchallenged because there was no workable definition of peasants. This changed in 1986 with the publication of [Seavoy's] Famine in Peasant Societies, which contains the only workable definition of peasants" (pp. 2, 251). Peasants, according to the author, practice equalized access to land use, equalized sharing of harvests among households, and "minimal expenditure of labor in food production in normal crop years" (p. 3). Armed with these definitions, Seavoy subjects previous writers to scathing criticism for overlooking or downplaying these norms, prime targets being Willie Lee Rose, Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, and the present reviewer.

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