Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase - Hardcover

Brooks, Charles E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801431204 ISBN 13: 9780801431203

Publisher: Fall Creek Books, 1996

Synopsis

"Clearly written, thoroughly researched, and cleverly argued, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution makes a major contribution to a very significant topic: the reconstitution of the agrarian persuasion of nineteenth-century America and the careful location of that persuasion in the social context of rural communities."―Alan Taylor, UC Davis, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution

"By reconstructing the activities of the Holland Land Company, settlers, and the emerging entrepreneurial elite on New York's frontier, Brooks demonstrates that the market revolution was spurred primarily by capitalists, while small producers fiercely resisted efforts by landlords to establish market agriculture."―Journal of Economic History

Land development in western New York contributed to some of the most dramatic and convulsive changes in nineteenth-century America. In Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution, Charles E. Brooks explains how the Holland Land Purchase―in which the Holland Land Company purchased 3.3 million acres of land in western New York State― contributed to the development of a frontier region. Powerful cultural and religious changes flowing from evangelical Protestantism, together with settlement and the intensification of market relations, put western New York in the vanguard of capitalist transformation in rural areas. Brooks also describes the ecological impact of frontier settlement and the evolution of private land development based on the decision either to clear land for farming or to harvest forest products for potash, lumber, maple sugar, fuel wood, and scrub pasture.

About this title

About the Author

Charles E. Brooks is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University.

From the Back Cover

Land development in western New York contributed to some of the most dramatic and convulsive changes in nineteenth-century America. Charles E. Brooks studies the Holland Land Purchase to explain the market revolution in the New England and New York countryside by tracing the actual development of a frontier region. Brooks argues that historians have been too quick to view ordinary people as the pawns of various elites; the frontier farmers and small producers of the Holland Land Purchase, he maintains, cannot easily be placed along a continuum stretching from republican virtue to liberal self-interest. They simply wanted access to the land and resources necessary for a modest, comfortable life. Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution also explores the ecological impact of frontier settlement and the evolution of private land development based on the decision either to clear land for farming or to harvest timber resources for potash, lumber, maple sugar, fuel wood, and scrub pasture. When slumping land values and rising indebtedness generated a crisis for both landlords and settlers in the 1820s, conflict between the self-interest of small producers and the Holland Land Company's urge to control the region's economic growth was inevitable.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fall Creek Books
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801431204
• ISBN 13: 9780801431203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254