The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century

The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century takes us back to a world where families and farms were interwoven and everywhere on the landscape. Rejecting the view that the main theme of our agricultural history is the movement from household to market production and agribusiness, Richard Lyman Bushman offers an alternative scheme. In his lucid account, family farms pursued a flexible strategy, combining “self-provisioning”—supplying as much food, fiber, and fuel as possible from the unpaid contributions of household members—with the neighborly exchange of goods and labor and with commercial trades near and far (p. 11). This “precapitalist, nonmarket family economy,” set within a “market economy beyond the household,” drove the relentless expansion of farms all over America and propelled the growth of commerce in the Atlantic world (ibid.). It laid the basis for a prosperous republic of free white men and women and gave rise to the nation's original sins: displacing native families for European ones and subjecting people of African descent to whites' will, without the liberty to found and perpetuate their own families and farms

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