The rise of a market society in the rural Hudson Valley, 1780-1860

Nothing denotes the profound transformation of society in the Mid-Hudson Valley as plainly to a late-20th-century observer as the introduction of the word "capital" into the vocabulary of its people between the 1780s and the 1850s. The social and economic processes which underlay the movement from an understanding of the world rooted in concrete and particular experiences to general abstractions (which created the conditions that made it possible to associate capital with financial investments rather than merchants, to check a steamboat schedule rather than to wait simply for the next sloop to leave for New York City, and even to conceive of marriage in free-market terms) form the subject of this dissertation.; An analysis of diaries, correspondence, judicial and probate records, wills, account books and newspapers suggests that fear of bad harvests and penury gave rise to strategies of risk reduction and prudence in farm families at the end of the 18th century. Social imperatives shaped economic choices and influenced the goings-on beyond the agricultural neighborhoods at the market places of Hudson, Catskill and Kingston. Farmers, only a minority of whom traded regularly at the landings around 1800, were prudent innovators. They adopted new tools and stock which contributed to an increase in productivity. The departure from mixed agriculture to an emphasis on cattle raising and fodder crops effected the growth of a wage labor force. A significant number of the region's men subsisted mainly upon wages earned in agricultural work in the 1840s while women's burden increased with the growing importance of dairy production.; Natural resources attracted manufactures. The coming of industry altered the morphology of rural society and gave rise to a population unconnected to the agricultural neighborhood with its rhythms and rituals. New revenues of factory hands no less than merchants, artisans and farmers translated into visibly different life styles indicative of the formation of classes in the countryside in the first half of the 19th century.