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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Scott C. Martin, editor. Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789–1860. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2005. Pp. vi, 298. Cloth $75.00, paper $27.95.
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| The proposition that a market revolution occurred in the United States during and just after the Jacksonian era is by now well settled in American historical analysis. A good sign of the triumph of this idea is the appearance of essays such as the ones collected here, in which the market revolution forms an understood and generally uncontested backdrop to a variety of cultural changes. Only one or two of the contributors to this interesting volume question the existence of a market revolution, or its extent and timing, and only a few focus on specific economic developments and behaviors. It is, as editor Scott C. Martin explains, the "cultural impact of the market revolution" (p. 7) that is the subject here. This turn toward culture is not in itself notable; what is novel about this volume is that the market revolution is so often invoked and so little described. The clear implication is that there is no longer much need to tell the reader about cash crops and railroad schedules, or of daughters who spun yarn and thread in factories rather than at home. What are the unexplored cultural implications of economic changes we now know well, and seem largely to accept? |
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Confidence in this moment of historiographic transition is reflected in the substantive foci of these essays, which range across American culture to some of its geographic and ethnic edges—French Canadians in Vermont, Choctaws in the Mississippi Delta—and to movements and productions that would not be the first to come to mind as exemplars of the larger cultural response to the market revolution—black protest thought, exhibitions of exotic animals, and Edwin Forrest's portrayal of an Indian chief in the play Metamora (1859). In these and in other essays on such subjects as Yankee clock and tinware peddlers in the South, Lafayette College's program of manual labor education, and Timothy Shay Arthur's temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1855), there appears to be no pressing concern to prove the extent and significance of the market revolution by probing the experiences and cultural responses of broad and manifestly representative groups. The important exception is Catherine E. Kelly's thoughtful analysis of rural and small-town sociability, which, Kelly argues, changed during the last two decades of the antebellum period in response to new, big-city patterns of middle-class social life, incorporating in a selective fashion whatever new ideas and styles could be comfortably accommodated to the less formal and smaller-scale social networks of provincial towns. The setting is New England, a large enough zone of analysis, but it is clear that Kelly's insights can be extended much further, perhaps to most of a rustic American landscape that revolved ever more tightly around emerging urban centers. |
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Kelly's essay leaves us in little doubt about our being in touch with main lines of cultural change during the Jacksonian market revolution. But even here the revolution itself is kept at a certain distance. What Kelly examines are not changing market relations but bourgeois patterns of social life that are assumed to have been created anew within the centers of the market revolution. The same can be said of Patrick Rael's fine discussion of "The Market Revolution and Market Values in Black Protest Thought." Rael's essay has several interesting dimensions, but central to it is a sequence of cultural influence that leads from the market revolution to middle-class formation to bourgeois notions of respectability to black leaders' conceptions of injustice and racial uplift. Again, the market revolution is a step or more removed from its apparent cultural outcomes. Is there no need here for examining the first stage of this sequence? Could "bourgeois" values not have developed within more traditional market economies, and if so, is there so clear a relation between black protest thought, or changes in provincial sociability, and new relations of production and exchange? Others, myself among them, have made more and less detailed connections between the market revolution and bourgeois or middle-class formation, and it is on a body of earlier historical work that the present authors rely to help sustain their arguments. I do not wish to undermine these arguments—far from it!—but I would again point to the manner in which they proceed from assumptions about the market revolution that not so long ago were contested issues. |
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