The Marketplace of Revolution

 T.H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Accounts of the origins of the American Revolution often struggle with how to portray--or explain--participation and support from masses of ordinary, free colonists. As Breen points out, ordinary people only appear in sporadically in standard accounts which focus on colonial leaders, assemblies, and published writings. Yet, without substantive willingness on the part of the masses, the Revolution never would have happened.

Breen's highly original interpretation of the coming of revolution locates the answer within the broadly shared social experience of participating in the growing Atlantic world economy as consumers. It was in the marketplace that diverse colonists from disparate parts of eastern North American found a common language of consumption, identity, and engagement. He does not argue that being consumers, in and of itself, radicalized colonial consumers. But the dynamic of being consumers pulled colonists out of their localized lives and, through the growing Atlantic economy, brought them into contact with British merchants and markets; and with each other as well. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, different colonial groups such as backwoods farmers in New Hampshire, Puritan shopkeepers in Boston, and slave-owning tobacco planters in Tidewater Virginia had little in common. But, in a process which began increasing both quantitatively and qualitatively in the middle third of the century, increasing participation in the consumer marketplace created opportunities for self-fashioning and expression, while simultaneously also creating a shared experience with far-flung strangers up and down the Atlantic seaboard and beyond.

Because Breen's argument is so radical, he takes pains to develop it methodically--this is a dense book, and the argument is developed slowly. Well over half the book is devoted to establishing the context--the "Empire of Goods" as he terms it--within which this revolutionary change of public consciousness will take place. The crux of this change is the development of trust; Breen convincingly argues that this is the missing element in nearly all previous historiography concerning the revolution. Until ordinary people in all thirteen mainland colonies could trust that strangers in different communities who were personally unknown to them would be willing to make the same sacrifices they were, revolutionary activity was bound to falter and fail.

The consumer boycott, then, was not a minor expression of broader ideological commitment to revolutionary activity--it was the mechanism by which that commitment was developed and learned. The experience of being consumers taught colonists how to work together for a shared purpose, and how to create a national identity where none previously had existed.