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Will American Consumers Buy a Second American Revolution?
T. H. Breen
| David Steigerwald's bracing survey of recent trends in consumer history in the United States triggers an autobiographical response. While I welcome his generous praise of The Marketplace of Revolution, I must confess that I did not originally set out to write about ordinary eighteenth-century consumers.1 Rather, my project focused on questions directly related to the run-up to the American Revolution. I wondered how so many people separated by space and class, by religious affiliation and economic practice, had managed to come together to mount an effective resistance to Great Britain, then the strongest military power the world had ever seen. |
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On the eve of independence, informed commentators declared in no uncertain terms that the colonists could never achieve the unity required to sustain the fight against the imperial power. Even after the Continental Congress had convened in September 1774, Thomas Hutchinson, the despised royal governor of Massachusetts, who fancied himself an expert on American political culture, declared that "a union of the Colonies was utterly impracticable." After all, "the people were greatly divided among themselves in every colony, and ... there could be no doubt that all America would submit, and that they must, and moreover would, soon."2 Many Patriot leaders shared Hutchinson's gloomy assessment of American prospects. |
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Of course, the colonists succeeded. From a familiar teleological perspective, it is easy to take the mobilization of the American people for granted, but as I argued in Marketplace of Revolution, we must not do so. Before the colonists could challenge the British army, they had to discover how to communicate with each other, how to bridge profound cultural and social differences, even hostilities, and how to establish the bonds of trust that were a necessary precondition for revolutionary action. In my research, I became convinced that the new consumer economy that transformed the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century helped explain how distant strangers convinced themselves that they were participants in a common political cause.3 |
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The inspiration for the argument did not come from an exposure to studies of twentieth-century American consumer behavior. I should probably have read those works; no doubt my own scholarship would have been richer for my having done so. But my interests and curiosity carried me in another direction. I learned a lot, for example, about how eighteenth-century people living in France, Holland, and Great Britain made sense of an unprecedented flood of manufactured goods from scholars such as Jan de Vries, Maxine Berg, and Albert O. Hirschman. The work of de Vries, especially, shaped my thinking, for he demonstrated persuasively that in all the advanced economies of the period, ordinary families were actively adjusting to unprecedented consumer opportunities. They even redefined patterns of household production with the aim of participating more fully in the marketplace.4 |
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