| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. By T. H. Breen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xx, 380 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-506395-3.)
From 1986 to 1993 T. H. Breen published a series of important articles on the Anglo-American consumer revolution of the mid-eighteenth century and its relationship to the American Revolution. The empire of goods that helped provincials imagine themselves as Britons, he argued, later gave the same provincials a language of protest. This book is his long-awaited extended treatment of that topic.	1
It still packs a punch. Breen explodes notions of a colonial life bereft of markets or imported goods, an impression that the village-centered community studies of the 1970s and 1980s often left, despite their often explicit stress on eighteenth-century transformations. With more space in which to do so, he is able to draw out the implications of expanded credit, the principle of personal choices made in the market, and the inherent inequality of the relationship between colonial consumers and metropolitan sellers. At greater length and breadth, his creative use of newspaper advertisements, material artifacts, and contemporary commentary lends ballast to his claims, in the outset and in the later chapters of the book, that "goods became the foundation of trust" among protesting colonists and that nonimportation and nonconsumption were "brilliantly original" political strategies that mobilized the populace locally while also enabling ordinary people, including women, to think in terms of a larger American community for the first time (pp. xv–xvi). Breen's provocative theses make this study a landmark in both colonial- and revolutionary-era historiography: he has simultaneously helped revise our view of late colonial North America (making it more Atlantic or British and more modern) and used that redefinition to participate, in his own distinctive way, in the recent redefinition of the American Revolution as a triumph of liberal capitalism, in which the assertion of ordinary folk in politics and an optimistic view of markets and entrepreneurship are, pace Gordon S. Wood, seen as more or less the same thing.	. . .

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