Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems.
Miller, David W.
At first glance one might doubt the unity of a book with chapter titles as diverse as "Why Tobacco Stunted the Growth of Towns and Wheat Built them into Small Cities: Urbanization South of the Mason-Dixon Line, 1650-1790" and "The Split Geographical Personality of American Labor: Labor Power and Modernization in the Gilded Age." To be sure, this work is an occasion for Professor Earle to reissue eight articles which he published between 1976 and 1988, but by means o revisions, an introduction and four additional essays he molds the collection into a coherent and powerful view of American history.
For Earle, the most fundamental social reality is the production and distribution of staple commodities. The tiny Chesapeake tobacco ports in the late seventeenth century could do without a sophisticated marketing infrastructure and still cater to the preference of merchants for clearly distinguished varieties resulting from extremely localized soil conditions. Rising demand for food in the Atlantic world in the mid-eighteenth century, however, pushed areas with less fertile soil and/or less immediate access to th sea--the Maryland eastem shore, the lower James Valley, and the backcountry--into the production of grain, whose bulk required more complex storage and handling. The result was true cities, like Norfolk, with a full range of urban services.
Staple theory is useful, Earle believes, in addressing not only classic problem of geography like the location of towns of different types, but also classic problems of economic history which are not transparently spatial, such as the causes of industrialization. Joining the critics of Habakkuk's argument that entrepreneurs adopted the technologies which made the American industrial revolution because labor was scarce and expensive, he maintains that labor was in fact cheap in those northern cities where industrialization occurred, and remarkably expensive in southern cities where it generally did not. The crucial difference was the seasonality of staple production which both in the South and in England provided at least some rural employment all year round while norther agriculture left rural laborers unemployed for perhaps eight months out of the year. What made mechanical innovations attractive in northern factories was a large differential between skilled and unskilled wages, whereas in England a smaller wage differential made it less attractive for manufacturers to shift from artisanal to mechanized production.
But can the staple approach be applied to major problems in social and political, as well as economic, history? Earle takes on three such problems: (1 why Boston was the vanguard of the American Revolution, (2) why the country moved so inexorably toward Civil War in the 1850s, and (3) why American socialism failed.
Boston's problem since 1629 had been the absence of any staple commodity production in the Massachusetts interior. Given a hinterland too rocky and insalubrious to yield a marketable surplus (especially when inhabited by Purita farmers who attended more to the millennium than the market- day) Boston merchants turned to their "foreland," i.e. the overseas and coasting trade. Although they prospered form this strategy, it left them desperately vulnerable to the trade policies which Britain adopted after 1763 and impelled their city into revolutionary leadership while other colonial cities were less adversely affected. Then the Quebec Act and the Massachusetts Government Act in 1774, supreme British blunders in spatial policy, closed the frontier and interfered in local governance. The result was to drive the precapitalist interior into a temporary and hitherto unlikely alliance with the capitalist city, and precipitate the Revolution.
Whether slavery became the dominant labor system in any given region, Earle argues, was primarily a function of staple crop seasonality. Slavery might make economic sense anywhere the agricultural regime called for year-round labor (e.g. in colonial Narragansett, Rhode Island's dairying zone), and would be abandoned if the annual number of days' labor required fell sufficiently low (e.g., in the Maryland eastern shore areas which switched from tobacco to wheat). In the 1850s corn was supplanting wheat as the staple crop in much of the midwest, and corn's annual requirement for days of labor was greater than that of wheat though less than that of cotton or tobacco. Earle agrees with Eri Foner that the crisis was precipitated in large measure by fears of the expansion of slavery into the midwest, but unlike Foner he argues that those fears were well-founded: by the mid- 1850s slave labor would probably have cost com farmers less than free labor.
Earle uses regression analyses of spatial patterns in strike activity in 1880-9 and in the Socialist vote in 1912 to explicate the process through which the failure of socialism in America became manifest. From the results of those analyses he draws out fascinating, mainly confirmatory, consequences for Gutman's and Wiebe's insights concerning community in industrializing America. His conclusion, however, is that socialism's failure ultimately resulted from a structural condition rooted in staple crop seasonality in the grain belt: historically high differentials between skilled and unskilled wages.
Given the author's standing as a leading figure in American historical geography, readers will no doubt anticipate his efforts to show historians how to analyze problems in space; many will be surprised, however, that his work culminates in an elaborate analysis of time in American history. In a 95-page concluding chapter entitled "The Periodic Structure of the American Past" he attempts to provide for America a "macrohistory" worthy of the Annales school. To oversimplify an extremely complex and nuanced argument, Earle discerns a pattern of 45 to 60 year cycles in American history since the late sixteenth century within which not only economic change but religious revival, policy initiative, political dissent, environmental change and international war can b understood.
Earle argues that his periodization is consistent with those proposed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and other historians as well as students of Kondratieff long waves. The mechanism which drives this rhythm, however, is another process to which the geography provides analytic insight: innovation diffusion. In each cycle he sees a crisis of constrained resources which initiates a creative phas of innovation, mainly in the agrarian sector. The diffusion of these innovation runs its course within the period of the cycle, and a new crisis initiates a ne cycle. In what may be his most daring claim, Earle suggests that even the relative decline of agriculture to a tiny share of the national economy has not broken the cyclical pattern or its dependence on agricultural innovation but ha simply transferred such innovation to overseas locations in an interdependent world.
One seldom reads a work which so deftly combines resourceful empirical research mastery of historiography, theoretical sophistication and bold speculation. Undoubtedly it will be controversial. Whatever the fate of any of his particula arguments at the hands of his fellow U.S. historians, however, Earle has made a compelling case for the relevance of geographical inquiry for addressing historical problems.
David W. Miller Carnegie Mellon University
