Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Summary
his book explores how industrial capitalism emerged from rural societies in the American Northeast (Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts). It examines this phenomenon by looking at how rural people saw, responded to, and transformed the world they lived in (household structure). He presents a middle ground synthesis between “market and social interpretations” and argues that '''“markets are not determinant''' but are created in and derived from social circumstances.” The creation of markets was only one part of a wider shift in social and cultural relationships. The social structure of the mid-19th century resulted not from a single transition but from a set of interactions. “Demography, land shortage, the ‘market,’ household strategies, and capital accumulation …came together… to alter the character of rural new England.”(318) It was the slow accretion of a series of distinctive forms and organizations – shifts in the exchange systems, the use of credit, the emergence of cash and negotiable paper instruments and the charging of interest on debts – together came to form a new economic system. Clark challenges the notion that rural people were “passive victims” of the extension of the market; in contrast, he sees rural household farms (social structure – property distribution and division of labor) as shaping the terms on which they agreed to deal with developments taking place elsewhere. The absence of staple-crop exports in the late 18th century and the relative autonomy of independent farmers meant that sources of economic change in rural New England were internal to the rural economy. “The spring that drove the intensification of rural output in the late eighteenth century was the confrontation between families’ aspirations and the prospect of scarcities under the prevailing conditions of land distribution, production and exchange.”(325)

Example: The intensified rural production and the strains that it imposed led to an outward turning of the economy. Young men and women began to seek careers outside of farming. In particular, production and reproduction fell disproportionately to women, who then shifted their strategies to ease the burdens on them (textile/cloth). Moreover, the tension between parental authority and children’s concern to set up their own independent households was part of the spur to increased rural output between 1790 and 1820

See also: Charles Sellers, Joyce Boydston, Stuart Blumin,