The incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the capitalist world-economy, 1700-1860

Far from being an isolated or autonomous folk society, America's first western frontier was integrated into the national and international economies. Over two long historical waves, Southern Appalachia's transition to capitalism took the form of creating a peripheral zone that is situated in modern times within the geographical boundaries of a core country in the capitalist world-system. The first phase of incorporation began during the eighteenth century when the Europeans absorbed the region's indigenous peoples into the international fur trade and into the interstate rivalry for global hegemony. Following the destruction of the region's precapitalist mode of production and displacement of its Native Americans, settler Appalachia was "born capitalist" during a second wave of incorporation.

The region was articulated with the world-economy as a support zone for New World plantation economies and for the industrial centers of the American Northeast and western Europe. After its incorporation into the capitalist world- system, the region paralleled, in many ways, the development patterns that were occurring in other peripheral zones of the nineteenth-century world-system. Once integrated into the international division of labor, economic activity in Southern Appalachia was restructured in response to cyclical changes in the larger world-system. Settler capitalism on the Appalachian frontiers was accompanied by the development of a regional economy with interdependent export and local- market sectors; by the expansion of export-oriented agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, and extractive industries; and by the emergence of an array of wage and coerced labor mechanisms. As in other peripheral zones of the world-system, settler capitalism in Southern Appalachia was characterized by: (1) a tendency toward polarization, including concentration and centralization of resources and a wide gap between economic classes; (2) a highly skewed distribution of productive resources and wealth, with a high degree of absentee ownership; (3) the formation of a local comprador bourgeoisie class to mediate the domestic operations of world capitalism; and (4) the emergence of a large landless semi proletariat, followed by the marginalization of these households that did not own the means of production.