Book Review

Marjoleine Kars's account of the North Carolina Regulators seems inspired by an interpretive tradition most closely identified with scholars such as Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm. Like those social historians, she shows how ordinary people struggled to establish dignity within complex class structures not of their own making. In a crisp narrative style, Kars captures the local voices of resistance without losing sight of the larger social and economic forces that transformed personal frustration into organized violence. Her book makes a welcome contribution not only to the history of agrarian protest but also to the currently burgeoning field of Atlantic history.

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During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, thousands of people migrated to the Piedmont frontier of North Carolina. They came for many different reasons. The Moravians and Scots-Irish, who had long histories of disappointment in other places, traveled the wagon roads from Pennsylvania in search of fertile land and personal autonomy. Many disaffected Quakers and Baptists joined them. In hardscrabble settlements those groups negotiated profound cultural and religious differences, discovering at the end of the day that, whatever motives brought them to Carolina, almost all dreamed of owning independent farms large enough to provide for growing families.

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