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chapter 1 .................................................................................................................. Capitalism and the Arabian Nights, 1790–1892 T he population of the United States has always embraced a consumer ethic of one sort or another. Even before the market revolution of the early nineteenth century, historians tell of colonial subjects mobilized politically in a ‘‘revolutionary marketplace’’ in which their shared experiences as consumers helped a diverse population decide to support rebellion against Britain so as to protect consumer choice and domestic production.∞ Once the dust had settled, with the Revolutionary Wars resolved and the Constitution in place, shoppers in one Virginia town made a translation of the Arabian Nights the single most popular work of fiction sold by the local bookseller.≤ Years later, when those and other Anglo-American readers remembered the hours of enjoyment they had with the Nights when they and the Republic were still young, they always said basically the same thing: the Nights had ‘‘highly excited’’ their imaginations with vivid scenes of magical events and incredible wealth, ‘‘houses of gold and streets paved with diamonds.’’≥ The collection of short stories known as the One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights’ Entertainments would continue to be in steady demand in urban, rural, and frontier parts of the United States throughout the nineteenth century.∂ The translations Americans read shared a famous frame tale in which a Persian woman named Scheherezade each night recounted to her husband, King Shahriyar, a gripping story. Fearing he would kill her the next morning, every evening she refused to reveal the resolution of her story in order to persuade her husband to leave her alive for one more day. The next night, she would finally end the previous story only to begin another right away. As the frame tale went, Scheherezade saved herself for one thousand and one nights through her stories , most famously the tales of Aladdin and the magic lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and tales of the venerable Haroun al-Raschid, powerful but generous ‘‘governor of old Baghdad.’’ The mind-boggling luxuries described in the Nights contrasted sharply with 20 ...Capitalism and the Arabian Nights the modest, hard-working lives of those readers. For citizens who had just fought a war for economic and political independence, the Nights provided colorful metaphors of the potential contentment and plenty they might enjoy as consumers in a nation that, by 1840, was becoming a global powerhouse rivaled only by Britain. Here was a nation undergoing dramatic cultural and economic changes, especially in cities crowded with foreign and domestic rural immigrants , and open to expanding global trade. Increasing access to the world’s cultures, products, and people also meant that Americans increasingly had more ways by which to consider and display personal identity.∑ Many took to heart the antebellum consumer ethic of individuation by which people strove for self-improvement and economic autonomy displayed through the appropriate clothing or household reading materials, for instance, while endorsing the perceived democracy inherent in a market society that promised prosperity for all citizens.∏ In the beginning, Americans looked specifically to the Muslim world and the Arabian Nights for prototypes of luxurious consumption and transformation that served as metaphors for democratic capitalism. Americans gained access to Eastern literature as translated adaptations of the Nights and stories created in imitation of the Nights known as Oriental tales or ‘‘tales of the East.’’ Between the Revolution and 1892, middle-class and upper-class Anglo-Americans would use these sources and forms to construct an Orientana of the ‘‘ultra-artificial’’ that endorsed capitalism through compelling modes of consumption that allowed anyone to play Eastern. These Eastern characters endorsed hedonistic consumption and a consumer’s Oriental tale to help people think about the romantic promise of magical self-transformation, repose, and contentment to be found in the market. The consumer possibilities Americans would see in the Nights and other Oriental tales are an important part of the answer to the question of ‘‘how ‘the consumer’ arose,’’ as Frank Trentmann asks of why people chose to think of themselves as consumers in the nineteenth century.π Americans saw their acquisitive desires brought to life in the Arabian Nights and developed a consumer ’s Oriental tale to enact fantasies of contented, leisured consumption that was useful in both modes of market participation: as producers of goods and services that made the United States a capitalist power and as consumers seeking self-fulfillment and personal expression in a society of abundance...

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