| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

T. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xviii, 380. $30.00.
A little more than a half-century has passed since the publication of The Stamp Act Crisis (1953), but Edmund and Helen Morgan's classic study continues to serve as both frame and foil for contemporary historians of the American Revolution. T. H. Breen's fascinating new book is no exception. Like the Morgans, Breen regards the events of 1765 as a prologue to revolution, a moment that crystallized colonial suspicions toward Britain, created the specter of colonial independence, initiated a new generation of radical proponents of political rights, and, not least of all, introduced a new and surprisingly effective method of colonial resistance and unity: non-importation.	1
But while the Morgans saw the most significant historical legacy of the Stamp Act crisis as an ideological one—the "emergence," as they put it, "of well-defined constitutional principles"—Breen insists that constitutional principles and national unity would have remained empty abstractions well into the 1770s but for the opportunity that mercantile and (later) consumer actions provided colonists to implement them in daily life. Even then, non-importation and non-consumption would have been empty gestures had the colonists not been full participants in what historians have come to label the "consumer revolution" of the eighteenth century. As his title suggests, Breen moves the drama of independence out of the meetinghouse and into the spaces occupied by urban shops, country stores, and peddlers' carts. Not surprisingly, the model of politics that emerges is not so much grandly deliberative as modestly transactional. Through thousands of seemingly trifling exchanges, Breen argues, eighteenth-century Americans negotiated their way toward free agency.	. . .

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