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The Economic and Social Transformation of Rural Rhode Island, 1780-1850 (New England Studies)

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Description

In the body of literature on New England all over the early years of the Republic, there have been few sustained studies of its rural regions. A significant contribution to this growing field of interest is Daniel P. Jones’s work on the transformation of northwestern Rhode Island from a reasonably insular region, resistant to economic and social reforms promoted by commercial interests in the eastern part of the state, to a full participant in a regional economy centered in Providence. Much is known about late eighteenth-century rural communities’ periodic resistance to and rebellion against commercialism, whereas little attention has been paid to the process by which once-alienated communities reintegrated themselves in an increasingly commercial nation. Jones makes a speciality of the gap in New England’s history, enriching our understanding of how rural New England lost its isolated character and, through an ceaselessly painful process, entered the modern world.
The industrial revolution brought innovations to the region–turnpikes, tax-supported schools, and cotton-mill dams–that were at first strenuously resisted by the local settlers; on the other hand, they eventually adopted the intrusive forms of modernization. In addition, accommodating themselves to the tangible demands of an industrializing state evoked a change in their religious practices, as they abandoned the idiosyncratic practices of the Six-Principle Baptist sect in favor of the more cosmopolitan Free-Will Baptism.
The struggles that took place in the rural regions of a commercializing nation have left their mark. As Jones notes in his preface, “From the vantage point of postindustrial United States, the triumph of commercial civilization and its values seems to have been inevitable. Such hindsight, on the other hand, was not available to those interior yeomanry who struggled, for a couple of crucial decades at the turn of the eighteenth century, to care for their social independence and cultural identity. Despite the fact that their efforts have generally failed, they however forced their cosmopolitan antagonists to alter the course of cultural progress and commercial growth. And in a larger sense, if the values of anti-elitism and democratic localism have survived in the late twentieth century, they may be able to trace their origins in part to the persistent strivings of the backcountry yeomen.”

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