The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence - Softcover

Breen, T. H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019518131X ISBN 13: 9780195181319

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The Marketplace of Revolution offers a boldly innovative interpretation of the mobilization of ordinary Americans on the eve of independence. Breen explores how colonists who came from very different ethnic and religious backgrounds managed to overcome difference and create a common cause capable of galvanizing resistance. In a richly interdisciplinary narrative that weaves insights into a changing material culture with analysis of popular political protests, Breen shows how virtual strangers managed to communicate a sense of trust that effectively united men and women long before they had established a nation of their own.
The Marketplace of Revolution argues that the colonists' shared experience as consumers in a new imperial economy afforded them the cultural resources that they needed to develop a radical strategy of political protest--the consumer boycott. Never before had a mass political movement organized itself around disruption of the marketplace. As Breen demonstrates, often through anecdotes about obscure Americans, communal rituals of shared sacrifice provided an effective means to educate and energize a dispersed populace. The boycott movement--the signature of American resistance--invited colonists traditionally excluded from formal political processes to voice their opinions about liberty and rights within a revolutionary marketplace, an open, raucous public forum that defined itself around subscription lists passed door-to-door, voluntary associations, street protests, destruction of imported British goods, and incendiary newspaper exchanges. Within these exchanges was born a new form of politics in which ordinary man and women--precisely the people most often overlooked in traditional accounts of revolution--experienced an exhilarating surge of empowerment.
Breen recreates an "empire of goods" that transformed everyday life during the mid-eighteenth century. Imported manufactured items flooded into the homes of colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. The Marketplace of Revolution explains how at a moment of political crisis Americans gave political meaning to the pursuit of happiness and learned how to make goods speak to power.

About this title

About the Author

T.H. Breen is William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. An authority on the culture and politics of the early Atlantic World, he has written six major books, including Tobacco Culture and Imagining the Past.

Reviews

Arguing that the revolution of 1776 was the first in history based on evaporating brand loyalty, Breen draws a rich portrait of a Colonial society saturated with what Samuel Adams called "the Baubles of Britain": everything from fine china to Cheshire cheese. The colonists were divided by religion and industry, but they shared a common identity as consumers of British products—and, increasingly, as wronged consumers, once Britain levied exorbitant tariffs and used America as a dumping ground for surplus goods. Tea, the Coca-Cola of its day, became a symbol of imperial overreach. Colonists reacted with what Breen sees as the Revolution's brilliant innovation: the consumer boycott. Benjamin Franklin told Parliament that, while the pride of Americans had been "to indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great-Britain," it was now "to wear their old cloaths over again." Because they shopped together, Americans could rebel together.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 019518131X
• ISBN 13: 9780195181319
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 380