Andrew S. Terrell - HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750!

Wednesday; 13 October 2010

Précis: Innes, Stephen, ed.. Work and Labor in Early America. Chapel Hill: Published for the
Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Work and Labor is a collection of eight essays by the editor and chosen colleagues geared
at reexamining workplaces of the seventeenth through early nineteenth century colonial America.
Innes began by showing what current historiographical trends and conceptions were of this
period in the 1980s. He also resolves semantic issues between how our society now, and the
Stuart England-early American Colonies then, defined aspects of work, capital, and employment.
For starters, “full” employment was the measure for productive efficiency. Additionally, profit
was calculated by net spending on labor rather than on returns. In essence, unemployment crises
were the causes for general economic debacles. Innes agreed with John Smith that the promise
of the new world lay in its capacity of new jobs for the idle and unemployed in the motherland
and that the emigration of the labor force was also tied to the mass urbanization movement in
England. What struck this reader, was the statement that indicated historians have largely
overlooked the infinite labor demanded by colonial inception. To quote Innes, “Forgetting that
our ancestors who migrated here were laborers not lawyers,” is a tragedy in itself.
The essays follow four larger themes: family labor, work patterns and groups, rapid and
wide-reaching changes in the eighteenth century, and correcting the historiography of the period.
The exhaustive research of the authors reveal how much of this aspect of labor history has been
largely untapped. They implement tax records, diaries, court records, and ledgers in creating
their discussions. Family labor was the mainstay for early labor systems in America. As we see,
it was most prominent in New England, but still very present in lowland regions and the
Chesapeake. Male children, as it turns out, were of equal importance in New England as
indentured servants and slaves were in the Chesapeake region. The family system required
ongoing work of the men so much that even marriages often did not split up men from their
families. Another shocking revelation from the research of Laurel Ulrich, was how more socially
mobile and independent women were in the same region. She follows the diaries of Martha
Ballard, a midwife in Maine during the 18th century in efforts to introduce historians to an
“unrecognized social elite,” women, their daughters, female servants, and neighbors. In a sense
women were pioneers of the American entrepreneur and were as important as men in family
incomes. Women also were able to leave home sooner than men to join in other families through
marriage, or to join other neighbors in their enterprising cheese products and linen creations.
Tenant farming in Pennsylvania during the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth century
prospered alongside the expansion of rural industry and agriculture. The live-in workforce,
however, has often times been overlooked or oversimplified focusing on the end product of the
work force in the industrial revolution and subsequent labor movements. The cottager class
emerged in the 1750s because they were unable to make enough capital for complete autonomy,
nevertheless they were integral for large land holders who simply could not afford masses of
permanent, forced labor. Diversification in agriculture shook the tenant farming establishment,
Clemens and Carr show. Looking at the changes in the Chesapeake region, in particular from
1650-1820, we see a transition from tobacco and minor subsistence farming to mixed agriculture.
This happened more rapidly during the tobacco depression at end of the seventeenth century and
the new establishment never retracted. Craft specialization and proto-artisanship expanded

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Andrew S. Terrell - HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750! Wednesday; 13 October 2010

heavily alongside agriculture’s expansion. The downside to this newer system fell on female
slaves who could not work in the fields with the newer technology, and were not deemed useful
for the more “manly” blacksmithing and extraneous artisan crafts.
Labor organizations and working patterns also included early labor gangs who worked
from dusk to dawn and dealt mostly with sugar and tobacco where specialized farming
techniques required constant supervision and precise timing. Philip Morgan continues the
introduction to the new labor organizations known as task working. This method assigned tasks
to groups that could be completed sometime during the day allowing for more leisure time, even
among slaves. Labor moved to become artisans as slaves as well as white laborers saw their
conditions ameliorating even before the nineteenth century in some areas of the Caribbean
especially. The first working class, Billy Smith contends, appeared in Philadelphia from
1750-1800. However, the common conception that their was widespread social mobility in such
urban areas such as Philadelphia is proven to be a myth. In fact, Smith shows how that rule
mostly could apply to rural areas whereas urban working classes continued to work for same
wages their entire life never being able to afford more as they aged. Though Smith does not go
into larger issues of urbanization and possible links to inflation’s more serious attacks on early
urban centers, one believes there is definitely an additional level of analysis not yet explored.
Though it was not the aim of the editor to explore already extensively researched aspects
of labor history during this period, such as urban labor in the time leading up to the industrial
revolution, Smith and Rediker do approach the topic. Karl Marx’s law of concentration and
centralization of capital and the inevitable link to socialized labor is very prevalent in
mercantilist societies. Maritime seamen, Rediker asserts, were the key transitional figures in the
movement for urban centers and international labor movements away from paternalist customs
and more into the wage working class of modern times. The mercantilist capitalist economy kept
them employed and engaged in their conditions and wages; they were the connection between
producers and consumers. Because of the ever present threat of mutiny, strikes and other
problems aboard ships, seamen were very capable of controlling to a large extent their contracts
and conditions. Taking total control of such circumstances allow us to see pirates as a lower
class utopian society which is a very startling development overlooked even by piracy scholars.
Overall, the edited essays over early labor systems was a very enlightening approach to
an expanding area of research. Though written in the mid 1980s, the essays still push readers to
also look in their own fields for connections to labor movements and their impact on larger
episodes of history.