Ariel Ron

About Ariel's Work

Ariel Ron is a historian exploring how Northern agriculture affected economic growth and the expansion of federal power in the nineteenth-century United States. His focus on agrarian production and reform in the antebellum North offers new insights into the divisions leading up to the Civil War and the emergence of government institutions supporting education, research, and technological advancement.

Most narratives of nineteenth-century America contrast the agrarian South with the industrial North. But in his book Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic (2020), Ron argues that the family farms in the North were a more significant force in antebellum politics and economics than has been previously recognized. He documents the push for agricultural reform and innovation that spread through local agricultural societies and fairs; Northern farmers eagerly looked to new scientific understandings of soil, livestock, and cultivation to improve productivity and efficiency. Ron shows that this grassroots interest in agrarian reform coalesced into a formidable mass movement. Northern farmers pushed the federal government to support and maintain the reform movement through educational institutions, experimental farms, and a federal department focused on agricultural research, development, and regulation. At the same time, Southern states strongly opposed any federal involvement in agricultural development that might threaten the institution of slavery. Ron demonstrates that Southern opposition to legislation for establishing land grant educational institutions and the Department of Agriculture furthered tensions between the North and South. He asserts that passing this legislation during the Civil War cemented the federal government as an active force shaping U.S. economic development.

Ron sheds further light on agriculture’s contribution to American economic development in his 2023 essay, “When Hay Was King: Energy History and Economic Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” Ron contends that while cotton exports were important to the American economy, hay was vital to fueling the economy as fodder for the millions of horses used for work and transportation. Even after construction of railroads, horses remained a mainstay of the transportation infrastructure, moving goods, people, and machinery between train depots and stores, factories, and warehouses. Ron is expanding this article in a larger project on the role of horses in the industrial energy system. Through his attention to largely overlooked aspects of nineteenth-century America, Ron is reevaluating the economy of the period and uncovering the historical roots of the U.S. government taking an active role in shaping economic and technological development.