Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Blanke takes up several significant questions in this ambitious work. He argues that the "rural consumer ethos" that developed along with enlarged market relationships contained, at its core, a basic contradiction: most farmers adhered to civic republicanism, which sought "individual redemption through group harmony" (p. 1), while simultaneously seeking to enlarge material prosperity through market-driven production and consumption. In the course of supporting this proposition, Blanke also argues that, once supply networks stabilized after the Civil War, farmers' consumption patterns were demand driven, and that, especially as demonstrated by commercial advertising, urban merchants had little interest in or impact on rural consumption. The book's temporal and geographical sweep is both a strength and a weakness.

1

Blanke begins the story around 1825, when little money existed in the frontier regions and farmers provided most of their own needs within their communities. During this early period, complex systems of credit lubricated both the purchase of land and the distribution of goods in the developing hinterland. Settlers, with weak ties to their neighbors, found themselves deeply dependent on poorly developed and uncertain markets for their sustenance. In these precarious circumstances, they formed farmers' clubs and had strong incentives to adopt new technologies and techniques. Blanke sees this as the foundation for an elastic consumer ethos (p. 30) that merged scientific and commercial farming. These tendencies were strongly promoted by federal policies and by the provisioning needs of the Civil War. Building on an existing historiography of the developing market system, Blanke adds his own archival studies of specific agents or middlemen.

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