I had a very busy week, and as you can see, I didn't finish one of the two books before having to hand in a reading response! I was hesitant to post this one at first, for that reason. And then I forgot to post it. But here it is now...or, ok, after a bit of a reflective preamble.
This week is reading week, which, unsurprisingly, I am using for exactly its intended purpose. I have six books to read for next week, of which I've finished not quite two, and I also hope to go back through some of my other readings that I didn't do in as much detail as I'd have liked. I also have a goal of writing up all of this week's books, in three reviews/responses (as they are on three very different topics!). We shall see how I do...
There was some minor panic last week. Actually, that's a deceptive way of structuring that sentence: I panicked entirely last week about comps. I feel behind on readings, meaning that I had to go into class on Thursday not having completed two of the three books I was to have read. I have a personal policy of fessing up to the prof if I'm not prepared, and I did so. Some of my classmates are somewhat critical of that, since it wouldn't be good for my grade. But I worry that I'd get found out anyways, in such a small class. I'd rather have a 100% chance that the prof knows that I wasn't prepared and perhaps assumes me to be unreliable, than take a 50% chance that I get found out anyways and am thought dishonest, or a 50% chance that I say something ridiculous in my attempts to bullshit through class, and have him think me stupid. It's all a bit of a tradeoff. Ideally this will be the last time I'll be unprepared, as that was a very anxious day for me. Fortunately after panicking a bit for two days after that (and I do not use the word "panic" in a hyperbolic sense!) a friend who wrote her comps a couple of years ago mentioned that she felt similarly panicked for much of her first year of her PhD. At least knowing that my anxiety is, to some extent, normal, meant that I could focus on work again.
In terms of feedback from my professors (and I am putting this here so that I have a narrative of my comps work, rather than to share grades with the world! I do find it somewhat shocking that people actually bother to read my analyses) I've had one of these graded; the Poulter response got an A-. In theory I should think that's good enough, but in practice, well, I'd like to get As more often. It's not about the actual grades (although I am so fond of my GPA from the past couple of years that I am borderline secretive about it) but because I know that my work will probably slide a bit as I get more and more stressed out as comps approaches. If I can reliably get As and A+s on my work at this point, then hopefully I will still pass comps (I'm pretty sure that "pass" in this context is equivalent to a B. They have high standards!). Apparently these should be more like reviews than essays.
Enough reflecting and waffling. Here's the actual response:
Craig: Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists
Greer: Peasant, Lord, and Merchant
I write this
response with one large caveat: I admittedly have not finished Greer’s work,
and am basing this off what I learned from the preface. This will therefore be
a response largely to Craig’s monograph. I can only hope that the assumptions I
make about Greer’s work from his preface do not show themselves to be entirely
incorrect once I finish reading his text.
Béatrice Craig’s
Backwoods Consumers and Homespun
Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada is a quite
thorough examination of economic transitions in the Upper Saint John Valley,
also referred to as Madawaska. Based on official statistics and local record
keeping—including, for example, business ledgers and account books—Craig
outlines how a variety of players participated in a local commercial economy.
Among Craig’s main points is refuting the “staple thesis” which many historians
use to understand economic development; rather than revolving around a single
staple, Craig emphasizes how Madawaskayans maintained a diverse economy
involving local, regional, and international markets. She highlights the agency
of various participants in the economy, including men and women of various
nationalities and social classes.
Among the
strengths of Craig’s work is how she problematizes a range of terms, including
capitalism, farming, the economic sphere, and markets. She questions binaries
that are common in analyses of emerging economies, such as
subsistence/commercial, family/economy, and production/consumption, making a
clear case for blurred boundaries and elastic terminology.[1] Her
rejection of binaries is among her reasons for rejecting a Marxist definition
of capitalism, as it would imply a binary of employers/labourers that did not
exist in the Madawaska region.[2]
She points out that many historians label an economy as capitalist by
attributing values to their behaviours, even when their views aren’t specified
in historical records.[3] Peculiarly,
Craig has no such qualms about assuming agency based on an individual’s
actions, without records of their motivations.
An emphasis on
agency is a current through Craig’s work. Craig argues that the economy in
Madawaska was a “product of human agency…rather than the consequences of
abstract forces.”[4]
Notably, however, Craig portrays this human agency as, perhaps, unintentional,
arguing that through their attitudes and actions, producers and consumers
unknowingly shaped an economic transition.[5]
Through this emphasis on agency, Craig also shows capitalism as not an
inevitable economic destination.[6]
Agency, for Craig, is not limited to those with social or financial capital; for
example, she considers as well women’s agency through crafting their engagement
with textile markets, and as consumers. Rather than merely following a
capitalist market, Craig shows how Madawaskayans engaged with various levels of
the economy in very specific ways, using the market only when it benefitted
them, rather than by default.
Although not to
the extent of the political histories written by Fyson, McNairn, and Greer,
Craig’s work is still limited in gendered analysis; in many cases, women are
ghettoized into specific chapters. Her discussion of power relationships is mostly
class-based. Native peoples are mentioned, but remain in the background of
Craig’s analysis, and she offers little hint of intersectional identities. This
is quite likely a result of the sources that Craig had available for her
research, in which men were the default gender of producers except in specific
industries such as textiles; women became visible as producers in a very
circumscribed way, and were therefore the subjects of Craig’s chapters on
textiles and consumption, but in the background through the rest of the
monograph.
Structurally,
Craig’s decision to organize her analysis thematically seems quite sensible.
She occasionally, however, refers to “earlier” and “later” periods, without
being explicit as to what periods she means. One potential weakness of Craig’s
work falls in her emphasis on production, with consumption as the major subject
of only one of her nine chapters. While her chapters on production seem,
collectively, fairly definitive, her chapter on consumption reads as a
preliminary examination, perhaps due to the lack of records. This imbalance
creates the impression, likely untrue, that consumption was less important than
production to the economy. While Craig carefully outlines women’s roles as both
producers and consumers, her discussion of men’s economic roles emphasizes
their production. It could potentially be fruitful to divide the monograph into
equal sections, discussing production and consumption, or perhaps to avoid this
possibly problematic binary by integrating both production and consumption more
clearly into each chapter.
Ultimately,
Craig convincingly portrays the economy in the Upper Saint John Valley as largely
commercial, with people living in a world that was influenced by capitalism
despite not necessarily being capitalists. This distinction between
commercialism and capitalism may be innovative, but I cannot judge this without
knowing more about the surrounding historiography. Her analysis of this divide
is particularly apparent in her discussion of “principal men” or entrepreneurs,
who sat at a boundary between porous economic layers.[7]
These men had varying roles in social hierarchies, either disrupting or
reinforcing them through their social mobility and economic linkages.[8]
Overall, however, they were quite individualistic, a quality which Craig
carefully disentangles from capitalism.[9]
While not all major mediators, and occasionally more parasitic than beneficial
to the community, these principal men encouraged the community to identify with
the outside world, provided access to goods, and offered venues for social
exchange by opening public houses and inns.[10]
Greer’s work,
like Craig’s, is an in-depth study of a particular local area. He similarly
outlines how the commercially isolated area of the Lower Richelieu entered a
commercial, but not necessarily capitalist, world.[11] Greer’s
definition of capitalism is somewhat wider than Craig’s; he describes it as an
economy in which commodities are produced for market exchange, with
capital-owning entrepreneurs and property-less wage-earners at its centre. While
Greer portrays the parishes in his study as commercially isolated, Craig has a
different view of the Madawaska. A main part of her argument is that the
region, though geographically remote, was not isolated, and in highlighting
economic linkages in the area, Craig refutes the staple thesis and shows
export-led models to be inadequate for conceptualizing such an economy.[12]
Thus, the different thrusts of their studies may be due to the differences
between regions, as well as their starting points with different definitions of
capitalism.
Situated in
Quebec, Greer’s work is necessarily more political than Craig’s. Greer notes,
early on, that his insistence on the feudal aspects of rural society in the
Richelieu entails neither accepting the actions of the bourgeoisie, nor assuming
that the area maintains a feudal, non-capitalist cultural legacy.[13] Greer
and Craig also offer quite different justifications for the communities they
opt to study. Craig selected the Upper Saint John Valley due to its arguably
unique and strategically important position in local, regional, continental,
and transatlantic exchanges. Greer, however, selected his regions for their
apparent typicality, as well as based on the availability of sources. As Greer
portrays his chosen communities as unexceptional, his work offers more
potential to extrapolate his conclusions to other parts of rural Quebec;
Craig’s work, however, must to some extent stand on its own as a study of such
a particular region.
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