Reviewed by James A. Henretta | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4

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Reviewed by James A. Henretta | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. By T. H. Breen . (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii, 380. $30.00.) Reviewed by James A. Henretta , University of Maryland
The dust jacket of The Marketplace of Revolution trumpets Timothy Breen's study as "the most original interpretation of how the American Revolution happened to appear in the last fifty years." Although the source of that quotation, Professor Joseph J. Ellis, is prone to hyperbole, the claims of the book's author are nearly as sweeping. Only toward the end does Breen concede that he is not arguing "that consumer goods caused the American Revolution." "In Aristotelian terms, the claim is rather that the British imports provided a necessary but not sufficient cause for the final break with Parliament" (p. 299). We may well become suspicious when historians turn to philosophy to explain the reach of their argument, especially when the central links in the interpretation—the nonimportation movements of 1765–1766, 1767–1769, and 1773–1774—are so well known and well studied. Lawrence Henry Gipson devoted considerable space in The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775 (New York, 1954) to the colonial boycotts, and Merrill Jensen, in The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), discussed these movements at great length (264–273, 301–313, 354–372, 471–480, 515–528). Benjamin Woods Labaree's Boston Tea Party (New York, 1964) and more recent scholarship on the Daughters of Liberty by Mary Beth Norton and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, among others, likewise underscored the importance of nonimportation in mobilizing American resistance.	1
Despite the extent of previous attention to the role of nonimportation, The Marketplace of Revolution adds to our understanding of its nature and significance in three ways. First, Breen links the pre-Independence boycotts to recent scholarship on the "consumer revolution" of the eighteenth century. Defining Britain's North American possessions as "An Empire of Goods" in Part 1 of his study (chapters 2–5, pp. 33–192), he places the nonimportation movements firmly in the broad context of Anglo-American economic development. Second, in Part 2, "A Commercial Plan for Political Salvation" (chapters 6–8, pp. 195–331), Breen provides the most-detailed available account of the economic resistance movement. He has scoured the records of obscure towns and urban newspapers to show the scope and the depth of support for nonimportation and offers multiple illustrations of the rituals of public censure and shaming used to enforce it (pp. 249–262). This analysis breaks new ground by suggesting that involvement of ordinary colonists in the world of material goods, and their consequent opposition to the taxing of those goods, explains "how such a diverse population generated a sense of trust sufficient to sustain colonial rebellion" (p. xiii). Although not without weaknesses, this explanation of the process of political mobilization is both interesting and important.	2
Finally, and also in Part 2, Breen maintains that the "flood" (pp. 22, 147) of British exports pouring into the mainland colonies after 1740 and the resultant expansion of consumer choices produced a new liberal consciousness and a "bourgeois" definition of virtue. Ignoring classical republican notions of virtue that disparaged commerce and luxury, colonists made virtue "a function of liberal choice—in this case, of consumer decisions to forego private pleasures in order to advance the public welfare" (p. 210). This hypothesis—of the primacy of "consumer virtue" (rather than "republican virtue" or "Christian virtue") in "defining the ideology of the entire non-importation movement" (pp. 263–264)—links the two parts of the study. Breen's argument in Part 2 that "bourgeois virtue" was the driving force of the American resistance movement depends, in large measure, on the interpretation in Part 1 that "An Empire of Goods" produced a new social consciousness among hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans.	. . .

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