The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860. By Wilma A. Dunaway. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
In The First American Frontier, historian Wilma A. Dunaway seeks to dismiss multiple myths about Southern Appalachia. The idea that the area had a unique culture based around subsistence agriculture and that Southern Appalachia “had not undergone the ‘normal’ linear advance towards modernity” are the main points Dunaway convincingly dispels. (3) The author contends that Southern Appalachia did take part in the antebellum global economy but suffered as a “periphery” to the “core” nations and areas. Thus, the author argues, Southern Appalachia engaged early in its history in capitalism but in a way that did not benefit the majority of Appalachians and contributed to the economic decline that is still evident in 2011.
Dunaway begins with a chapter on her methodology. She explains that she will be using world-systems analysis due to its advantages in offering a view of Southern Appalachia as part of a bigger picture. According to this paradigm, Southern Appalachia became part of the global economy as a frontier “peripheral zone.” The periphery provides support through natural resources and widening markets for the “core nations.” In the case of Southern Appalachia, those core nations were originally Spain and England, followed by the American Northeast and plantation South after the Revolution.
The rest of her work seeks to explain how Southern Appalachia became a peripheral zone and why it remained at that level. She finds the origins of the area’s involvement with capitalism in the slave and fur trade between the indigenous Appalachians and Europeans in 1540 through 1763. In particular, the work focuses on the Cherokee and the manner by which they became so dependent upon the Europeans that they could not support themselves without the global market. Following the Revolution, Euro-Americans flooded into Southern Appalachia, eventually pushing out the indigenous. However, the distribution of land to these newcomers was uneven. Absentee investors monopolized most of the land. By 1810, such investors, completely obliterating any possibility of a majority of small farmers, owned three-quarters of Southern Appalachia. (85)
This unequal division created what the author calls a “semiproletariat” who historically “neither own the means of production nor are they remunerated for their labor on a reliable or equitable basis.” (87) Without land, they lacked a means to support themselves, and without a thriving industrial society, they could not be pure wage earners. Instead, they became tenant farmers or lived in towns and worked on farms seasonally. Those who did own land invested their resources into what was already producing a profit, agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources, and not diversified industry.
Dunaway further focuses on how non-economic factors caused the deep polarization in Southern Appalachia. Planter elites dominated politics, and they focused on promoting the types of agriculture and industry that had made them wealthy but failed to bring Southern Appalachia out of peripheral status. The land-based inequality led to an inattention to infrastructure and education, causing Southern Appalachia to fall behind the rest of the United States in literacy and income. Once the few elements supporting the economy, large-scale agriculture and natural resources, began to decrease in demand, the entire region suffered a slow and lasting economic decline.
Dunaway’s work is extremely well organized. She ends each chapter with a useful summary and never digresses. In taking a macro approach to Southern Appalachia’s economic history, she goes beyond simple case studies and generalities. She uses extensive primary documents and valuable quantitative analysis, including a welcome appendix on how she gathered and utilized the data. However, she is often repetitious and uses so much terminology that the book would be inaccessible to a general reader. This is a shame, because her work is extremely valuable in casting off both the romanticism and disgust associated with Southern Appalachia.
The First American Frontier is a necessary addition to the historiography of the South and Appalachia. Dunaway snips the myth of the subsistence farmer, never touched by market influences, away with a surgeon’s precision and attention to detail. She soundly supports her argument and completely explains the methodology. The work would be valuable to historians, economists, and political scientists studying current issues in rural America and the Third World.
Meredith May Texas Christian University
The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860. By Wilma A. Dunaway. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press (1996), 448 pgs.
According to Wilma A. Dunaway, Southern Appalachia has fostered a number of historical myths worthy of explosion. Her 1996 work, The First American Frontier accomplishes this task with unsympathetic but objective aplomb. In Dunaway’s analysis, historians and lay people alike continue to mistakenly describe it alternatively as a backwater, backwoods, and backward region or as the romanticized pristine paradise for self-sufficient, Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. Rather, Southern Appalachia stands as a “national tragedy,” (4) the marginalized and continually impoverished product of an unrelentingly exploitative capitalist order. In this regard, Dunaway offers the world-systems theory as “a more promising explanatory framework than any of the existing approaches for exploring the transition to rural capitalism in the United States.” (5)
Her first chapter serves as a basic theoretical defense of the world-systems paradigm as it applies to the development of Southern Appalachia. One of the strengths of this analytical approach, according to Dunaway, is that it incorporates non-European actors into the story. Thus, her consideration of the region begins not with white settlement but with contact between Europeans and the Native Americans’ precapitalist economic order. Dunaway briefly describes how virtually every aspect of the Native Americans’ socio-economic world shifted upon increasing contact with European capitalists. Contact commodified war, land, agricultural produce, and items like deerskins to the economic benefit of the Europeans, who in this case stand as the personification of the world capitalist system.
This state of affairs continued with white settlement, which further commodified the land. Land jobbers would inspect and sell tracts to wealthy land speculators, who in turn became absentee landlords who might rent the land to itinerates, sharecroppers, or other landless workers. Thus began region’s endemic cycle of poverty, as the absentee capitalists first exploited the land itself for their gain. Next, they similarly exploited the produce of the land. Dunaway here explodes the myth of subsistence farming in Southern Appalachia. Based on extensive primary and secondary research, Dunaway concludes that less than one percent of the land and fewer than ten percent of the farmers produced at a subsistence level. The vast majority of the region engaged in for-profit agriculture, with little of the profit reinvested locally. Dunaway thus argues that Southern Appalachia lived to serve the centers of capitalist commerce. This helps counter the notion that the region was simply an isolated, backward enclave of precapitalism. Rather, it was heavily immersed in capitalist culture from the moment of European contact, and the system was deeply entrenched by the early 1800s.
Dunaway furthers this argument by debunking the myth of self-sufficiency on the region’s farms. A great deal of the region’s farmers exploited various forms of “coerced labor” (90), including tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and slaves. This commodification of labor thrust further dependence and marginalization upon most of the region’s inhabitants. Because it possessed a relative abundance of labor but a remarkable lack of local capital, Dunaway suggests that Southern Appalachia was doomed to “stunted” (154) incorporation into the world capitalist system, “culminating in a wide economic gap between this region and the rest of the United States.” (155)
Dunaway devotes much of the remainder of her work to fitting this account of Southern Appalachia into the rest of the world capitalist system. She regards its development and exploitation as not dissimilar to that of Brazil or the West Indies. These all served as production zones, which flowed through distribution zones into the consumer zones of the world system. One chapter purports to extend the analysis of the impact of this process beyond economic terms. Dunaway here includes rather brief and ultimately unfulfilling descriptions of the impact of this capitalist transformation and exploitation upon the region’s political order, social system (including division of labor), and the environment. Despite its brevity, the section on environmental exploitation stands as Dunaway’s most unique contribution to the application of the world-systems theory.
This device, a neo-Marxian paradigm in all but name, is subject to the same charges of analytical myopia as its perhaps more controversial progenitor. Although Dunaway indeed attempts to broaden her analysis into various questions of culture, these are clearly the superstructure to the capitalist base. While interestingly conceived, these inquiries occupy relatively scant space in her analysis, leaving the reader to assume that they are affected by, and do not themselves influence, the capitalist world order. In this way, “capitalism” is the driving, and seemingly the only, historical actor in this approach. Capitalists and proletariats alike lose their agency in what is otherwise a striking analysis. Dunaway has produced a well-written, though jargon-filled, defense of a thought-provoking paradigmatic approach to history. Her research and documentation well serve a wide range of scholars, and allow for a great deal of value to eclipse the work’s sometimes problematic analysis.
Matthew A. McNiece