High Mountains Rising by Richard A. Straw Read Free Book Online Page B

development of major salt deposits in Michigan, all doomed the Appalachian salt industry. Nevertheless, along the Kanawha River it hadstimulated large-scale industrial organization based on extraction and spurred the development of lumber, coal, natural gas, boat building, and smaller-scale industries such as coopering that paved the way for industrialization, which came to the Kanawha Valley after the Civil War. 10
    The historical evolution of Appalachia’s economy has been the subject of debate for several decades, but explanations of the industrial transition fit into several general categories. The traditional view is that from colonial times to the Civil War, farmers were small subsistence producers who lived in an agrarian society characterized by isolation and the absence of linkage to external markets. Others reject the idea that capitalism and market economics did not affect rural Americans until the Civil War and contend that a “market revolution” occurred during the Jacksonian era that sparked the transition of an economy based on local self-sufficiency to one dependent on external markets. A third group of scholars reject the “agrarian myth” outright and argue that farmers were never truly self-sufficient, culturally or geographically isolated, or completely uninfluenced by larger market relations. Instead, they contend that even during early colonial times farmers had preferred cash and profits to mere subsistence and were consumers as well as producers. 11
    A more recent perspective emanates from the writings of noted scholar Immanuel Wallerstein. This view conceptualizes capitalism as an expansionist “world system” evolving over centuries and operating over and above the collective decisions of individuals. Capitalism is continuously expansive in its search for markets, until the world is organized into various stages of incorporation: the core, or major metropolitan centers of investment capital and commerce; the semiperiphery, highly developed commercial staging areas for capital and trade; and the periphery, or fringe regions where raw materials are extracted to support the more developed spheres within the system. Economic relations that hold together the world system are replicated in the semiperiphery and periphery spheres. Thus, in preindustrial Appalachia the developed sections provided staging areas for the importation and shipment of money and goods from the fringe to the semiperipheral urban areas of America. 12
    Modern scholars of Appalachia typically reject the ideas that a great polarity existed between preindustrial and industrial Appalachia or that a sudden and cataclysmic change transformed a region previously untouched by capital. Even the most remote sections of the region were involved in the market; true isolation was rare and transitory. 13 As Kenneth Noe observes, “Modernization did not strike a primitive culture in the 1880s”; it was already under way in the 1850s. 14 Wilma Dunaway goes further and argues that the region was capitalist from the moment of European intrusion. 15
    One of the reasons for the uneven development of preindustrial Appalachia is not the lack of capital investment but rather its limitation in the older, settled sections of the region. Just as Appalachia was at the periphery of American capitalism, the undeveloped interior of Appalachia was connected to the more urbanized areas around its edges, where links with the market system were first established. Settled at an early date on the Ohio River, Wheeling, Virginia, became a redistribution point, with commercial connections in the emerging national market centers such as Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, and with smaller markets back in the mountains. 16
    As in many parts of the country, the Civil War had a traumatic effect on the postwar economy of Appalachia. Scholars are still analyzing its role in shaping the postwar industrial expansion, which reached a climax