科研之友
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摘要
The character of local exchange has long assumed an important place in the historiographical debate on the capitalist transformation of the American countryside. Whereas that character has been carefully examined in nearly every rural corner of the United States, it is poorly understood in the context of early agricultural California. Based on a systematic analysis of the diaries of one California farmer, this essay explores the everyday, local exchange practices of ordinary farmers, especially among neighbors. It finds farmers relying on one another extensively for a wide range of goods and services and maintaining dealings that assumed both commercial and non-commercial characteristics. It argues, moreover, that such findings reinforce criticisms of how scholars have traditionally defined early California's rural economy and that they challenge some of the dominant paradigms in rural American historiography that characterize the nineteenth-century economy either in essential terms or in terms of an uneasy coexistence of ambivalent systems.
- 出版日期2013
