Abstract
This chapter focuses on Massachusetts’ agriculture and rural life at the turn of the nineteenth century. I survey agriculture in the Connecticut River Valley at this time and show how it was articulated within broader social and economic relationships. Additionally, I explore the development of agricultural science through societies and publications and I highlight the transition from Improvement as an elite, specialized, and experimental activity in New England to Improvement as a middle-class, generalized, and productive activity. I argue that Improvement in New England manifested itself in the changing political-economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I suggest that Improvement gained the prominence that it did in the early nineteenth century because of a dramatic economic and social break in New England between urban areas like Boston and rural areas like the Connecticut River Valley. Cultural, social, and economic mechanisms of hegemony began to fall apart at the end of the century, and Improvement emerged as a way to reassert the dominance of the market-oriented city over the more nebulous mixed economy of the countryside. I draw on primary and secondary literature on New England farming to paint a picture of the productive relations, social relations, and economic outputs of the region’s farms.
The birth and development of the idea of progress correspond to a widespread consciousness that a certain relationship has been reached between society and nature (including in the concept of nature those of chance and “irrationality”) such that … mankind as a whole is more sure of its future and can conceive “rationally” of plans through which to govern its entire life.
— The Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci (1971, p. 357)
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Notes
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Though the state of Massachusetts was invested in agricultural policy, this was a period pre-dating federal involvement in agricultural matters. The US department of agriculture would not be founded until 1862. Prior to this, agricultural affairs were dealt with under the auspices of the department of the interior, and prior to that, in the US Patent office, and then only beginning in 1837 (Danhof 1969, pp. 67–68).
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Hereafter the “the three counties”.
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Lewis, Q.P. (2016). Improvement and Agriculture in Massachusetts at the Dawn of the Nineteenth Century. In: An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22105-2_4
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