Circumscribed as this subject is, its historiography in this century has followed a dialectic closely paralleling the dialectic of American history-writing generally. A preliminary survey of the debate will set the argument of this paper in its proper setting.

The debate began with Percy Bidwell. In all his work he described eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century farmers in New England as trapped by poor husbandry in chronically low-yield, subsistence agriculture, isolated by the lack of markets from the growth generated in the commercial sectors of the economy.

The point here is that Bidwell's perspective was fully consistent with the Progressive historiography of his own time. Substantively, he confirmed that conflicts of interest existed, in this case between farmers involved in the market and those locked outside it, between farmers with land who could remain and those without land who would have to move on, between farmers on the one hand and merchants and artisans on the other. In addition, the methodological consequences of putting about three quarters of New England's population beyond the reach of the market were congenial to the Progressives who wanted to limit the dominion of abstract theory over the rough texture of real life.