Fordham University
“Mountaineers Are Always Free: The Political Ecology of Dispossession”
What can we learn about the demise of the smallholder in the western world from the transformation of Appalachia beginning in the 1880s? The mountain households of West Virginia were not the first agrarians to be dispossessed of land and subsistence, but they might have been the first to confront a new combination of resource extracting corporations acting with the legal support of the United States. This paper will explain the capitalist takeover of the southern mountains, beginning with the settlement of subsistence households after the American Revolution. Poor Whites fleeing the expansion of lowland plantations appeared to disappear from the landscape, rarely appearing on maps. Their central ecological pillar was the free-range forest--a source of food and pasture that earned them money (in the form of cattle and other livestock) without costing money. Without adequate forest, in every season, no mountain household could subsist. Once households and the resources they only lightly controlled became visible to extracting corporations, as early as the 1840s, they lost title and other rights to land. Swindled and unrepresented, they could do little but participate in the clearing of the forest after the Civil War. This marked their fall into wage dependency--the end result of a siege that no army could have accomplished but which took capital about twenty years. The model of Appalachia, complete with its self-justifying literature about making idle resources profitable and poor outliers productive, helps us to understand the worldwide assault on peasant peoples since the 1950s. Other models of modernization (that incorporate smallholders rather than eliminate them) do exist, but only where capital and nation-states find advantage in keeping agrarians in place. Appalachia has repeated itself all over the world--especially in Mexico, Indonesia, and South Africa.
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