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Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, £30). Pp. 320. ISBN 0 19 507236 7.

Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, £30). Pp. 320. ISBN o 19 507236 7Masters of Small Worlds, as the sub-title reveals, is a work with unusual breadth of analysis. Evangelical religion, women's history, and the nature and patterns of antebellum landownership all come within the author's remit. The central tenet of McCurry's study is that "lowland political culture" in South Carolina "was neither 'herrenvolk democracy' nor 'planter aristocracy'." Yeoman farmers, if subordinate to the planter elite, possessed a fierce independence as landowners and heads of household in their own right. Their support for slavery was less an act of submission than part of a shared commitment to the ideal of a " conservative Christian republic." The defence of slavery was seen as crucial for the protection of property rights in general. Moreover, slavery symbolized the masculine hegemony that prevailed in the Low Country. The role of women, from whatever social class, was marked by such extreme legal and cultural subservience that marriage was little more than a " benign metaphor for slavery." The defence of the one institution thus became inextricably bound up with the preservation of the other. The ambitious scope of McCurry's work means that some criticism is, perhaps, unavoidable. One problem is the limited availability of primary sources. Yeoman farmers "left behind few of the texts that have allowed entrance into planter households: diaries, account books, correspondence, pamphlets and narratives by former slaves, to name only the most obvious." Given this relative dearth of information McCurry, at times, relies heavily on a few case studies that have survived into the historical record. Insufficient sources may also, in part, account for the author's wideranging definition of yeomen as " ' self-working farmers' who owned fewer than 150 acres of improved land and fewer than ten slaves." The lack of any bibliography is another source of grievance. This omission is the more unfortunate in that McCurry examines such a varied range of tissues that few readers will be familiar with all the works used. Taken as a whole, Masters of Small Worlds is a work in which the strengths clearly outweigh the weaknesses. McCurry's view of the slave south as an unchecked male patriarchy is, as the author herself acknowledges, hardly new. Nonetheless, in its sheer breadth of vision and attention to detail her analysis includes much that is fresh and original. This, combined with a persuasively lucid and thoughtful written style, make this work a pleasure to read.