Social origins of Appalachian poverty: markets, cultural strategies, and the state in an Appalachian Kentucky community, 1804–1940

Abstract

Appalachian poverty has typically been interpreted as the result of either persistent economic isolation or, conversely, absentee corporate capitalist exploitation. Instead, by stressing the interplay of slave-based manufacturing and commerce, and the self-exploitation and exploitation of family labor in subsistence farming, we locate the social origins of Appalachian poverty in the indigenous development of the mountain economy prior to the advent of capitalist industrialization. By examining the interplay of markets, cultural norms, and the local state in nineteenth-century Clay County, Kentucky, we picture the diversity and complexity of non-capitalist class processes in Appalachia prior to the modern era of coal mining and show how these contributed to the pattern of dependent capitalist development and poverty for which the region is well-known.

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