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Volume 2, Review 5, 1996
Wilma Dunaway. THE FIRST AMERICAN FRONTIER: TRANSITION TO
CAPITALISM IN SOUTHERN APPALACHIA, 1700- 1860. Chapel Hill, North
Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvii+448 pp.
ISBN 0-8078-2236-1, $49.95 (hardcover); ISBN 0-8078-4540-x, $21.95
(paper).
Reviewed by
Michael Timberlake, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and
Social Work, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA
v. 8/12/96
With ever-increasing speed and intensity, since the 16th
century the Western European-centered world-system has
incorporated and peripheralized the rest of the earth's land and
people, transforming relations among people and between humans and
the natural and cultural environments. Commodification and
proletarianization have been fundamental to this transformation.
Other key processes have been uneven development and resistance.
Dunaway concretizes these processes by giving us an exceptionally
careful account of Southern Appalachia's historical transformation
from an external arena to a periphery of the world-system -- an
internal periphery within the rising semiperiphery that was the
United States at the onset of the American Civil War.
THE FIRST AMERICAN FRONTIER works powerfully on at least two
levels. First, Dunaway's foremost explicit central thesis is that
the character of Southern Appalachia was molded by its intimate
involvement in world-systemic processes. On this level she is
addressing primarily students of regional American history,
countering the widely expressed view that this region's
underdevelopment, or backwardness, is explicable in terms of its
[Page 1]
alleged isolation. The reader is reminded of images of the self-
sufficient backwoods family, living off the land by farming,
hunting, and subsistence household production, minimally involved
in exchanges with the rest of the world, and unready and
culturally unavailable for modern industrial development. Such
allusions are threaded throughout much of the literature on the
region, Dunaway points out. But these claims are empirically
unfounded and theoretically naive.
Dunaway details the empirical weakness of the isolationist
position on the region's underdevelopment with a detailed
examination of the historical record. Her data-dredging is guided
by world-system theory. Instead of isolation, she finds clear
evidence that Southern Appalachia's history from before 1700 was
one of involvement in the institutional and cultural structures of
a dynamic world-economy. She argues, for example, that the region
-- and the indigenous peoples who occupied it (i.e., the
Cherokees) -- became important early on as a peripheral fringe of
the British, used as a buffer shielding the colonies from the New
World manifestation of the hegemonic rivalry of the era. This
role shaped the region, profoundly restructuring Cherokee social
organization and culture, integrating these people with the world-
economy. For example, the British encouraged the trade of primary
commodities, such as Cherokee deer skins for British manufactured
goods. The commodification of land soon followed, with much of it
passing into the hands of distant absentee speculators, planter
capitalists, and settler elites (who together owned three-fifths
of the region's agricultural land), with only a small proportion
owned by small investors and heirs. (In an appendix, Dunaway
describes her complex and careful methods of analyzing courthouse
and other records in order to accurately describe such patterns of
land ownership.) In the region, land is increasingly important,
first, in relation to the removal of indigenous peoples and the
successful European settlement of the region, then ultimately as a
mechanism of regulating labor.
Agricultural production was certainly important within the
[Page 2]
region, but it could hardly be characterized predominantly as
subsistence agriculture. Several categories of landless
agricultural workers, including slaves, indentured laborers, and
sharecroppers provided the labor needed to render profitable the
investments in Appalachian land that had been made by distant
speculators and local elites. Thus, ". . . land served as the
critical mechanism for anchoring labor relations between
landholders and propertyless families" (p. 119). These structural
arrangements generated agricultural surpluses that Dunaway shows
were exported from the region, in many cases to European
destinations, further integrating the region within the global
division of labor. The nature of development generated by this
integration, however, was akin to that which
has typified much of the Third World. As has historically
been the case in the peripheries of the modern world system,
Southern Appalachia never fully experienced the final step in
the transition to (core) capitalism, for the region's
antebellum agriculture and manufacturing were never fully
separated. Instead, locally dominant agrarian-merchant
elites and absentee speculators sank the region's limited
investment capital into enterprises that were complementary
to those activities stimulated by integration into the world
market. [pp. 154-155]
Thus, the region's underdevelopment was reproduced by its
peripheral integration into the world economy; with its social
structure molded by these linkages. For example, class formation
in the region mirrored that of other of the world's peripheries:
a highly coerced semiproletariat, including slave labor, the
emergence of a comprador bourgeoisie as the region's political
elite, and disproportionately small representation of mid-size
agriculturalists.
Dunaway includes a similarly detailed and compelling
discussion of the region's extractive and manufacturing
[Page 3]
industries, also revealing their peculiarly peripheral character,
and making a strong argument linking this to the way in which the
region was interlinked with the world-economy. Again, Dunaway
backs up these claims with painstaking attention to detail, using
census records and other primary sources as well as reinterpreting
some secondary sources. Timber, ginseng, coal, copper, salt, and
iron in addition to wheat, corn, cotton, hogs, cattle, and even
turkeys were produced in the region and exported in significantly
large quantities. There are fascinating chapters on spatial
integration and commodity chains. She documents (and maps) a
"highly rationalized" network of water transport, for example.
The region's rivers comprised the most important transportation
avenues, connecting a large proportion of its counties "ultimately
to the Atlantic or Gulf seacoasts" (p. 209), but overland
transport was important as well. Although the region's counties
were linked to the "outside" through an elaborate system of river,
canal, and turnpike transport through which exports left the
region, most of these exports left in unfinished form. Southern
Appalachia was clearly at the bottom end of the global division of
labor, with (relatively) capital-intensive processing (e.g., shoe
manufacturing) of locally-produced inputs (e.g., leather) taking
place in distant places rather than within the region. Once
again, its peripheral status in the national and world-economy was
reinforced by these patterns of production and exchange.
As a carefully crafted argument for reconsidering Southern
Appalachia's underdevelopment the book seems to me to be
overwhelmingly successful, although historians of the region will
be the final judges. The book is clearly successful at the
theoretical level as well. Dunaway shows that using world-system
theory serves as an important sensitizing framework in guiding the
collection, interpretation, and reinterpretation of historical
facts. The result is a far more persuasive explanation of the
region's underdevelopment than has apparently heretofore been
available -- one that makes sense of the numerous ways in which
Southern Appalachia was integrated with an encompassing political
[Page 4]
economy and which flies in the face of the pervasive
view that the region's underdevelopment was rooted in its isolation
from the "modern" world. At the same time, her methods of
analysis compel her to reveal weaknesses she finds with the
world-system paradigm, at least in the manner in which it has usually
been used. She does this by paying a great deal of attention to the
ways in which the cultures and environments of the region were
changed by its incorporation and peripheralization. For example,
she includes an interesting analysis of the ways in which the
indigenous Cherokee culture reacted to and was changed by
incorporation, followed by a discussion of the ways in which
capitalist values came to permeate social relations among these
and subsequent inhabitants of the region. Thus, world-system theory
is seen as an invaluable interpretive tool for reformulating the
historiography of this region, but it is used critically. The history
of the region was, in some ways, too rich and too big for the
theory -- at least as it is usually articulated. Rather than ignore
these aspects of the history, Dunaway contributes, at least implicitly,
to theory by suggesting that it be reformulated to address these
important aspects of social change.
Even though Dunaway's effort is about a very specific region
during a very specific period of time, there are other general
lessons it provides. The book demonstrates the relevance of using
world-system theory to interpret other historical examples of
uneven development within countries, even those of the core and
semiperiphery. For example, social change in the region known as
the Mississippi Delta is also subject to a world-system analysis.
It was populated by European and coerced African immigrants as it
was being integrated into the world-economy in a similar position
as exporter of agricultural products and raw materials. The
historical examples of both Southern Appalachia and the Delta also
suggest a more nuanced interpretation of the role of "the state."
Usually world-system analysis focuses nearly exclusively on the
role of the national state. But in these two cases, we are forced
to acknowledge the importance of local states. For example,
[Page 5]
county governments, politically controlled by what
historian James Cobb calls the "county seat governing elite,
" are crucially important in reinforcing the very conditions
associated with peripheralization. Dunaway finds that the local
state regulated debt, promoted external trade, granted incentives
for certain industries, and redistributed lands "upward"
through tax sales. Her observations along these lines have important
implications for how the world-system paradigm could better theorizes
the state. I would have liked to have seen Dunaway more explicitly
deal with some of these theoretical implications in the book.
THE FIRST AMERICAN FRONTIER is an exemplary work of
scholarship. It combines serious attention to the theoretical
insights of world-system theory with meticulous attention to the
historical record. The result is a compelling analysis of one of
the most fascinating and misunderstood regions of the United
States. No doubt historians of the American South will also
recognize this to be a significant, possibly controversial,
contribution to knowledge of this region's history. The book
should also be read by scholars and students interested in
comparative historical sociology, world-system theory, regional
studies, and rural social change. It would also be useful in
graduate and advanced undergraduate classes in these areas.
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