A Review Of Th Breen's Marketplace Of Revolution

Book Review of

T.H. Breen

The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics

Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004)

The benefit of hindsight allows modern historians to assume that colonists in British America united easily and naturally to throw off the bonds of tyranny in 1775-1776. The fact that "thirteen clocks were made to strike together" (p.4) surprised even the revolutionary leader John Adams. Prior to the mid-1700s many residents of British North America saw themselves in regional roles rather than as "Americans", they were Virginians or Bostonians, regional loyalties trumped any other including those as British colonial citizens. In T. H. Breen's work, The Marketplace of Revolution, he offers an explanation for the sudden creation of a unique American identity. In his words, "What gave the American Revolution distinctive shape was an earlier transformation of the Anglo-American consumer marketplace" (p. xv). Breen contends that before Americans could unite to resist the British Empire, they needed to first develop a unity and trust with one another in spite of their regional differences. "The Marketplace of Revolution argues, therefore, that the colonists shared experience as consumers provided them with the cultural resources needed to develop a bold new form of political protest" (p. xv). The transformation of the consumer marketplace allowed the colonists of British North America to create a unique British and the American identity that would later result in revolution and the formation of a new nation. This trust based on consumption, Breen concludes, was absolutely necessary for the boycott movement to be an effective tool against the British government. "Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people protest remains a local affair easily silence by traditional authority" (p.1).

Breen suggests that the trust that developed during the 1760s and 1770s allowed for the rapid growth of the boycott movement against British goods to pressure Parliament into rescinding taxes imposed without colonial consent. During this period, colonists began to see themselves more in the context of Americans due to the printed materials that were becoming more widespread and abundant, as well as by their participation in the expanding colonial marketplace. According to Breen, consumer goods provided the essential and "powerful link between everyday life and political mobilization" (p.19).

In the early eighteenth century consumer goods flooded American markets, the colonists needed to sell what they produced in order to purchase British goods that were beyond their ability to manufacture and therefore made them feel more a part of the British "empire of goods". Breen successfully demonstrates the spread of imported goods into every niche of colonial America, and further concludes that the consumer revolution "depended ultimately on an extraordinary expansion of credit throughout the Atlantic world" (p.136). In his assessment, Breen suggests that the rapid expansion of the marketplace through credit reflected negatively on those colonials who sought to acquire through credit what they could little afford otherwise. In reality, credit was a necessary evil in matters of business during this period. Because the mother country's economy and state revenues increasingly relied on exporting manufactured goods, a continually growing colonial market became more valuable and credit more and more necessary. The passage of the Navigation Acts had benefited Britain in that they created a captive market for goods produced in England, and made those goods manufactured in other places less affordable than those of British manufacture. In addition, writers of the time encouraged colonists to consider their consumption as essential to the empire, making the consumers feel more British, but creating the means necessary to register their protest in the form of the boycott. Other, more conservative, writers were critical of the consumer habits of what they considered lower classes, who relied heavily on credit to obtain the "baubles of Britain" (p.62). They criticized their ability to purchase "superfluous things which showed an inclination to finery...such as a looking glass with a painted frame, half a dozen pewter spoons and as many plates...a set of stone tea dishes, and a teapot" (p.34). Their abilities to purchase these "luxuries" created instability in the established social classes. Breen dismisses these writers as curmudgeons threatened by social change and unable to follow their own advice in the area of consumption. He dwells instead on "the comforts and pleasures of consumption" (p.44), especially for those of the middling classes.

Breen invests consumer goods with the power to liberate the minds of common people, and to weaken colonial inequality. People, according to him, made a conscious effort to participate in the "empire of goods" as to make themselves equal to their neighbors in colonial America. The ability to participate in the consumer marketplace gave the colonists a distinct sense of who they were within the context of society. In short, the consumer revolution, according to Breen, created a society built on " the ability of ordinary men and women to establish a meaningful and distinct sense of self through the exercise of individual choice, a process of ever more egalitarian self-fashioning" (p.55).

In his analysis, Breen tells only half the story by emphasizing a colonial America that was becoming more egalitarian. The "empire of goods" created an additional inequality between the growing planter and merchant classes and those who served in less exalted stations in life. Although the small merchant and what we would term professional classes could aspire to an enhanced style of living (and those of more meager means could expect to find more choices in goods available to them at lower costs); the chasm was ever widened by the continually renewed efforts of the wealthy to emulate the latest fashions popular among the British gentility. Breen further stressed the availability and affordability of goods that were common, useful, and frequently durable items such as teapots, pewter ware and textiles. Breen gives little attention to the more expensive items that created divisions within society. John Adams expressed how socially and economically divided society truly was in his reaction to the mansion of a Boston merchant. He remarked that the furniture alone, "cost a thousand Pounds sterling...the Turkey Carpets, the painted Hangings, the