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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- PART I INTRODUCTION -- 1 Interpreting Rural Economic Change -- PART II INVOLUTION: 1780 TO THE 1820s -- 2 Households and Power in the Countryside in the Late Eighteenth Century -- 3 Households, Farming, and Manufacturing -- PART III THE BOUNDS OF INDEPENDENCE -- 4 Family Burdens and Household Strategies -- 5 Merchants and Households -- PART IV CONCENTRATION: THE 1820s TO 1860 -- 6 "The Advantage Their Pay Demands": Morality and Money -- 7 Capital, Work, and Wealth -- 8 Farmers, Markets, and Society in Mid-Century -- PART V CONCLUSION -- 9 The Connecticut Valley in Perspective -- Appendix: Population of the Six Towns, 1790-1860 -- Index

Frontmatter --CONTENTS --Illustrations --Preface --1. "One Common Enterprise" --2. Founders, Origins, and Contexts --3. "They Will Soon Convince the World": Shelter, Base, and Mission --4. "To Live in the Common Cause": Life in Community --5. The Business of Utopia: Output, Silk, and Debt --6. "Too Despotic Power": Members and Leaders --7. From Community to Factory Village --8. The Communitarian Moment --Abbreviations Used in the Notes --Notes --Index

AbstractThe territorial growth and capitalist development of the United States that began in the late eighteenth century entailed ‐‐ among other things ‐‐ a massive expansion of agriculture that continued until the 1920s. Though based on private, freehold property in land there was no single pattern to this agrarian growth or to agriculture's integration into national and global flows of commodities, finance, and labor. Slave and non‐slave systems expanded in parallel until 1860, but even the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of industrial and finance capitalism did not impose uniformity on American agriculture or undermine independent, household‐based farming.