Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  25.  On the claim for Chaucer and Shakespeare in mountain dialect, see Frost, “University Extension in Kentucky”; Semple, “Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,” 1–7; Graffenried, “The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills,” 497; Fox, Blue-grass and Rhododendron, 15; Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, 62. The best piece debunking the idea is Montgomery, “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” passim. On the general subject of mistaken origins, I benefited from Keesing, Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon, passim, and Roth, “Notes on the Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon,” 374–75. “Learn me how to lose a winning match,” Romeo and Juliet, III.ii.12.

  26.  Huntington, Williams, and Van Valkenburg, “Climate, Health, and the Distribution of Human Progress,” in Economic and Social Geography, 118.

  27.  Jones, A Dreadful Deceit, xi.

  28.  Allen, The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, 273–76. The historian David Hsiung suggests connectedness as a more accurate description. It accounts for remoteness but emphasizes the linkages that people forged and maintained. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains, 10–11, 69–70. Frank Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, vii-viii, quoted in Otto, “Southern ‘Plain Folk’ Agriculture,” 29; Allen, “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1890, 561. For many examples and an analysis of this literature, see Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Minds, 157. Appalachian Regional Commission, Network Appalachia: Access to Global Opportunity, www.arc.gov/noindex/programs/transp/intermodal/NetworkAppalachiaAccesstoGlobalOpportunity-Chap1.pdf.

  29.  Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 327; Nourse, “The Place of Agriculture in Modern Industrial Society II,” 561–77; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory, 28.

  30.  New York Journal, April 23, 1900, quoted in Harkins, Hillbilly, 7; Fowler, “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Fields,” 387; Allen, “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland,” 575–76; Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 19.

  31.  Robinson, “Anecdotes of the Mountain Folk,” 930–32.

  32.  Lewis Cass, “Removal of the Indians” (January 1830), quoted in Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Removal, 115–20.

  33.  Jackson made these remarks in his State of the Union Address of December 6, 1830 (Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Removal, 125) and in a circular to the Cherokee dated March 16, 1835 (www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/content-images/07377p1.jpg). The removal cannot be separated from the politics of land and slavery that intensified after the Missouri Compromise, which outlawed slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of 36°30′. Planters wanted every last corner of Georgia (and Alabama and Mississippi) to employ their slaves. A decade later, they needed still more, and that is when they made their next major gambit for Texas. Letters and firsthand accounts of the removal may be found in Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Removal, 171–76.

  34.  I refer here to Worcester v. Georgia (1832), in which Chief John Marshall upheld Cherokee sovereignty from the laws of Georgia but stated that the federal government maintained jurisdiction over all Indian nations. See Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Removal, 81.

  35.  As James C. Scott writes of the mountains of Southeast Asia, “Neglected and seemingly useless territories to which stateless peoples had been relegated were suddenly of great value to the economies of mature capitalism.” See Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 11; White, Backcountry and the City, 31–35; and Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 150–51.

  36.  Kwashiorkor is caused by protein deficiency.

  37.  Holmberg, Nomads of the Longbow, 8, 11, 44, 77, 96. See Mann, 1491, chap. 1.

  38.  According to the anthropologist Barry Isaac, this representation of the Sirionó as “man in the raw state of nature” amounts to a vicious conception of hunter-gatherers. “And so long as the Hobbesian view prevailed, Holmberg’s description of the Sirionó—with their desperate food quest, short life span, quarrels about food, etc.—did not seem odd.” Isaac, “The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia: A Reexamination,” Human Ecology, 137–54 (Isaac does not accent the last vowel). I also used William Balée’s entry on the Sirionó in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Another early study that differs in substantial ways from Holmberg’s is Stig Rydén, A Study of the Sirionó Indians. I also read Allyn MacLean Stearman’s restudy of the Sirionó, No Longer Nomads. And see Mann, 1491, 10.

  39.  Baumol and Blinder, Economics: Principles and Policy, 811.

  40.  For this chain and other similar cycles, see Wallerstein, Unthinking the Social Sciences; Samson, A Way of Life That Does Not Exist, 96–101. Frank quoted in Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System,” The Capitalist World Economy, 7.

  41.  Ronald L. Lewis first made the argument that the destruction of the Appalachian forest led to dependency in Transforming the Appalachian Countryside. He does not use the term ecological base. Among the first uses of that phrase comes from Radhakamal Mukerjee, Man and His Habitation: A Study in Social Ecology (1940). For other references to the ecological base, see Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 87, and Gudeman, Anthropology of Economy, 134. Mike Davis makes a distinction between economic and ecological poverty, which I see as the same distinction between makeshift economy with and without a viable ecological base. See Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 310.

  42.  Williams, The Country and the City, 37.

  43.  Toynbee, A Study of History, 570.

  44.  Ibid., 148–49.

  45.  Idleman, History of the Mt. Storm Community. For other firsthand accounts, see Shackelford, Weinberg, and Anderson, Our Appalachia. John Alexander Williams gave a similar lament: “What went wrong? What was done, or not done, to guarantee the failure of West Virginians’ aspirations for their proportionate share of the national wealth?” Williams, West Virginia and the Captains of Industry, 2.

  2. Provision Grounds

    1.  The theory of stages is pervasive in political economy. Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, book I, chaps. 4, 14, 28. Newton, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1862 (“In its rudest state men subsist, for the most part, upon the chase, or such roots, fruits, and grains as are easily gathered. In its second stage men follow the pastoral life, wherein as nomadic tribes, inhabiting hilly countries or table-lands, they depend chiefly upon flocks and herds for food, raiment, and locomotion”). Hamilton, Federalist, No. 30; World Bank, Rural Development: Sector Policy Paper; Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; Adams, Curious Thoughts on the History of Man; Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 83–84. For a discussion, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 124–25.

    2.  There are many examples. “Civilization, therefore, is an improved condition of man, resulting from the establishment of social order in place of the individual independence and lawlessness of a savage or barbarous mode of life.” Cartée, Elements of Physical and Political Geography, 218. The complete isolation and cultural otherness of hunters and foragers seemed so obvious by the twentieth century that an anthropologist could instruct children in 1948, “A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them and eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.” Braidwood, Prehistoric Men, 86–87.

    3.  A. S. Kline, trans., Virgil: The Eclogues, Eclogue IX, www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilEclogues.htm; Williams, Country and the City, 16–17.

    4.  The entire series is in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. Paine, Agrarian Justice.

    5.  Kames made a remarkable statement about the relationship between population and production that, while it lacked any data, was more accurate than anything uttered by Malthus: “In fact, the greatest quantities of corn and of cattle are commonly produced in the most populous districts, where each family has its proportion of land.” Kames, Sketches of the Histo
ry of Man, 83–84. Ester Boserup would lend fieldwork and anthropological insight to the same idea in The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. Also see Smith lecture, March 29, 1763, in Lectures on Jurisprudence, vol. 5, 297. Adams, “Society and Civilization,” 83–85.

    6.  The Scots sometimes referred to it as a conjectural narrative, in the words of Smith’s friend Dugald Stewart. In other words, they acknowledged that they had no direct evidence of the distant past. Instead, they theorized that civilization must have appeared in stages. While many societies did change from hunting to farming, they did so for complex reasons, not because the latter represented progress over the former. See Brewer, “Adam Smith’s Stages of History.” Marx, The German Ideology, in Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 156; Turner, Frontier in American History, 35; Sachs, Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, 220.

    7.  Wallerstein, Capitalist World Economy, 3; Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 225; Sauer, Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds, 3.

    8.  Adams, Curious Thoughts on the History of Man, 2. As the historian Michael Perelman has stated, “For much of classical political economy, self-provisioning was nothing more than a residue of a savage past.” Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 124–25. Other political economists who noted this include Steuart, Principles of Political Economy, chap. 28, and Drayton, Nature’s Government, 54.

    9.  Some anthropologists believe that the separate tasks of male and female sapiens allowed them to survive scarcities of game that drove their Neanderthal cousins to extinction. Sapiens separated hunting and gathering by sex, while Neanderthals appear to have all hunted, forgoing the benefits of gathering. Kuhn and Stiner, “What’s a Mother to Do?,” 953–81. Another example is the division that exists between people who live in different environments. People who have hides and furs can trade them to people who have metals. See Smith, Wealth of Nations, 11, and Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 474–77.

  10.  Smith, Wealth of Nations, 987. Smith worried about social inequality. See the same source, 132–33, 1064–65.

  11.  Williams, Lectures on Political Principles, 85. Urquhart, Familiar Words, 119. Urquhart founded the Free Press in 1856. Marx quotes the same sentence quoted here in chap. 4 of Capital. Also see Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics, vol. 5, 27, 71; Davis, “Eleventh Anniversary Address,” 1–29; and Emerson, “American Scholar,” 54.

  12.  As the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say recognized, “Agriculture does not allow of one person being continually employed in the same operation.” Say, Treatise on Political Economy, 96.

  13.  I thank Colin A. M. Duncan for this insight.

  14.  For a discussion of labor organizations and political clubs, many of which appeared after Smith wrote, see Thompson, Making of the English Working Class.

  15.  Smith, Wealth of Nations, 12–13.

  16.  For the best work on James Steuart, see Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism.

  17.  “Hence I conclude,” Steuart wrote, “that the best way of binding a free society together is by multiplying reciprocal obligations, and creating a general dependence between all its members. This cannot be better effected, than by appropriating a certain number of inhabitants, for the production of the quantity of food required for all, and by distributing the remainder into proper classes for supplying every other want. I say farther, that this distribution is not only the most rational, but that mankind fall naturally into it.” Steuart, Principles of Political Economy, 116. Steuart was by no means the first or only person to make these arguments. They date to the end of the English Civil War and the onset of enclosure in the seventeenth century. See Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, 149. Every critic of peasants and settlers echoed Edward Chamberlayne, who urged Britons in 1668 to make the most of their resources, saying, “It is the Interest of the Common-wealth, that every Subject should make a right use of his own Estate,” even suggesting that “a Guardian should be set over the Person and Estate, not only of Mad-men, but of all prodigal Persons.” Edward Chamberlayne, England’s Wants, 14. And see Hartlib, The Reformed Husband-man, 2–4, and Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib His Legacy of Husbandry. Drayton, Nature’s Government, 54.

  18.  This and the previous paragraph: Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 35–36. Colquhoun, Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire, 110 (emphasis in original); Temple from a pamphlet of 1739, quoted in Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 253; Paine, Rights of Man, part II, 56; More, “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,” in The Works of Hannah More, 192–93.

  19.  List, National System of Political Economy, 170–73. Turgot, Reflections 11 and 12 in Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth. Jean-Baptiste Say echoed all those who said that while farming might have made civilization possible, it no longer did. Manufacturing had inherited that mantle. Not an abundance of grain but the output of factories “marks the distinction between a civilized community, and a tribe of savages.” Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, 64.

  20.  Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, chap. 7; Marx, Communist Manifesto, 224; Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 945. The argument that idiocy is mistranslated comes from Hal Draper’s The Annotated Communist Manifesto. Draper’s long footnote is reproduced here: https://linguisticcapital.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/mistranslating-marx-the-idiocy-of-rural-life/.

  21.  Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals: Analytic Fictions, 1492–1945,” 850; World Bank, Rural Development: Sector Policy Paper; Polanyi, Great Transformation, 88–89.

  22.  Merrill, “Putting Capitalism in Its Place,” 317–18. I have benefited especially from Wood, The Origin of Capitalism.

  23.  Langland, Piers Plowman, Passus 8, lines 310–40. The feast was recorded by John Leland around 1506 from what he described as a paper roll. Joannis Lelandi: Antiquarii De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, vol. 6, 10. There is no direct evidence of the feast. Sutton and Hammond, Coronation of Richard III, 286, 294–95.

  24.  For this and the previous paragraph, see Giovanni Boccaccio, quoted in Aberth, ed., The Black Death, 78–79; Braudel, Mediterranean World, 62; Hurst, Sheep in the Cotswolds, chap. 4.

  25.  Steve Muhlberger, ed., Tales from Froissart, quoted from www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/muhlberger/froissart/tales.htm.

  26.  Quoted in Kulikoff, British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 11–16.

  27.  Le Roy Ladurie calls this cycle of food and famine a bellows in Peasants of Languedoc, 150–55 and conclusion. Behringer, Cultural History of Climate, 109–13. The reason the two should be understood together is that epidemic plague played a part in causing a colder climate. So many people died all over the world (including the Amerindian epidemics) that trees returned to millions of acres of farmland, absorbing enough CO2 to cause a fall in temperatures. CO2 fell by 10 parts per million during this period, a number that has no purely geological explanation. See Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum.

  28.  Some have seen centralizing nation-states under monarchical authority, like the rational totalitarian kingdom propounded by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), as a response, not only to the slaughter that went on between Protestants and Catholics and the English Civil War, but to Europe’s three hundred years of subsistence crisis. Behringer, Cultural History of Climate, 109–13.

  29.  On common lands there are a number of useful sources. I benefited from Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons, 15–16, and Ostrom, Governing the Commons.

  30.  For a very useful primer on land in the everyday life of a medieval woman, see Bennett, A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, 87, 97. The best description of tenures and estates I found is Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, 31–36.

  31.  For a complete discussion of the transition of the aristocracy and many of these ideas, see Wood, Origin of Capitalism, 97–100.

  32.  Hurst, Sheep in the Cotswolds, chap. 4. For more about wh
at improving farmers called “convertible husbandry,” see Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth.

  33.  This and the previous paragraph derive from Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, 156–63, and Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After. I especially learned from Joan Thirsk’s “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. IV, 99–106, 200–55. A work of history that flushes out all the dimensions of this process, neither squarely of one interpretation or the other, is Keith Wrightson’s Earthly Necessities. It includes a penetrating description of enclosure as proceeding by fits and starts, over centuries not decades, sometimes by negotiation, and with plenty of protest and condemnation. Historians now regard the seventeenth century as the most vigorous period of enclosure. Twenty-four percent of England was enclosed in that century, 2 percent in the sixteenth, 13 percent in the eighteenth, and 11 percent in the nineteenth. Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 148.

  34.  Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, 158–59. Wrightson gives this account of Sedgemoor, a region of fens: “The draining of the eastern fens, initiated with crown support, was represented as a project which would bring a barren and unprofitable wasteland into cultivation … The fact that the area was already occupied by thousands of fenlanders who derived a poor but independent living from its numerous resources was overlooked, and the formidable resistance to drainage which they sustained for three decades was gradually worn down.” Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 211.