Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution

"Clearly written, thoroughly researched, and cleverly argued, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution makes a major contribution to a very significant topic: the reconstitution of the agrarian persuasion of nineteenth-century America and the careful location of that persuasion in the social context of rural communities."—Alan Taylor, UC Davis, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution

"By reconstructing the activities of the Holland Land Company, settlers, and the emerging entrepreneurial elite on New York's frontier, Brooks demonstrates that the market revolution was spurred primarily by capitalists, while small producers fiercely resisted efforts by landlords to establish market agriculture."—Journal of Economic History

Land development in western New York contributed to some of the most dramatic and convulsive changes in nineteenth-century America. In Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution, Charles E. Brooks explains how the Holland Land Purchase—in which the Holland Land Company purchased 3.3 million acres of land in western New York State— contributed to the development of a frontier region. Powerful cultural and religious changes flowing from evangelical Protestantism, together with settlement and the intensification of market relations, put western New York in the vanguard of capitalist transformation in rural areas. Brooks also describes the ecological impact of frontier settlement and the evolution of private land development based on the decision either to clear land for farming or to harvest forest products for potash, lumber, maple sugar, fuel wood, and scrub pasture.

Charles E. Brooks is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University.