The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

FRONTIERS^297

Farm wages and land prices, of course, set a floor for urban wages—

otherwise, how hold the labor?—while the very growth of such a fron­

tier economy pushed wages up.* Here is Smith again:

It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving,

or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are

highest. England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country

than any part of North America. The wages of labour, however, are much

higher in North America than in any part of England.^6

America's society of smallholders and relatively well-paid workers
was a seedbed of democracy and enterprise. Equality bred self-esteem,
ambition, a readiness to enter and compete in the marketplace, a spirit
of individualism and contentiousness. At the same time, smallholdings
encouraged technical self-sufficiency and the handyman, fix-it mental­
ity. Every farm had its workshop and anvil, its gadgets and cunning im­
provements.^1 Ingenuity brought not only comfort and income but
also status and prestige. Good workers were the envy of their neigh­
bors, the heroes of the community. Meanwhile high wages enhanced
the incentive to substitute capital for labor, machines for men.
As a result, the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution found
fertile ground in the American colonies and then the United States.
Even earlier, the need for self-sufficiency in an age of slow and inter­
mittent communication gave rise to local manufacture. Listen to a re­
port of 1681 on the quickness of Quaker settlers to engage in industry:
"... they have also coopers, smiths, bricklayers, wheelwrights,
plowrights and millwrights, ship carpenters and other trades, which
work upon what the country produces for manufactories.... There are
iron-houses, and a Furnace and Forging Mill already set up in East-
Jersey, where they make iron." Another report of 1698 speaks of cloth
manufacture: in the Quaker communities of Burlington and Salem,
"cloth workers were making very good serges, druggets, crapes, cam-
blets, plushes and other woolen cloths. Entire families engaged in such

* In an effort to protect the Indians, the British authorities tried to limit westward ex­

pansion to the Appalachians. In vain: all the redcoats on the continent could not have

guarded that frontier, any more than the United States today seems able to close the

Mexican border.

t The best similar example of a handyman culture that comes to mind is that of the

Swiss Jura, where cottage workers laid the basis for the world's most successful watch

industry—Landes, Revolution in Time, ch. xvi: "Notwithstanding the Barrenness of the

Soil."