Shop Talk: Liberalism, Consumerism, and the American Revolution

T. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xviii + 380 pp. ISBN 0-19-506395-3, $30.00.

The Marketplace of Revolution is the culmination of more than twenty years of sustained inquiry by the distinguished early American historian T. H. Breen into the economic culture of colonial America. Sweeping in scope and magisterial in conception, it sets forth a novel interpretation of the American Revolution that is predicated on the assumption that the pursuit of happiness in the eighteenth-century America referred more to the promise of personal fulfillment than to the promotion of the common good. In the language of colonial historians, Breen's American revolutionaries were paragons of 'bourgeois virtue' rather than 'civic humanism.' Breen's principal historiographical foil is Bernard Bailyn and the so-called republican interpretation of the American Revolution with which Bailyn and his student Gordon S. Wood long have been linked. Breen's interpretative allies include Jack Greene, Joyce Appleby, and the many historians who remain convinced that liberal individualism lies at the core of American national identity. Although Breen's revisionism is not altogether persuasive—at least to this reviewer—his argument will repay close attention and is sure to be much cited and discussed in the years to come.

The American Revolution, in Breen's view, was the "first large-scale political movement in recorded history" to "organize itself" around the "relation of ordinary people to manufactured consumer goods" (p. xviii). This movement—which Breen terms a "revolutionary politics of pursuing happiness" (p. xviii)—originated in the 1740s, when Britain's North American colonists began to increase dramatically their importation of what Samuel Adams would later deride as the 'Baubles of Britain'—primarily textiles, clothing, and crockery. It accelerated between 1763 and 1773, when a large number of colonists joined together to boycott the consumer goods on which they had so recently come to rely—a "genuinely innovative strategy for promoting communication and mutual trust" among distant strangers and a "spectacularly successful new form of political action" (pp. 19, 20). Ironically, the colonists' very dependence on English goods provided them with the symbolic means to protest their neo-colonial status. Today, the best known of these protests was the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Yet, this well-known event was but one of a series of collective actions that began in the 1760s, when small numbers of merchants refused on principle to import English goods and that culminated in the 1770s when thousands of colonists joined together to prevent English goods from being consumed. This transition from non-importation to non-consumption is, in many ways, the centerpiece of Breen's book. It was, or so he posits, a shift of "immense importance in the history of popular political protest" (p. 298).

Breen rests his argument in the intuitively plausible assertion that the mere invocation of a "language of liberty and rights" (p. 200) cannot by itself explain the formation of viscerally meaningful "political collectivities" linking the far-flung inhabitants of thirteen geographically dispersed colonies (p. xiii). 'Rights talk'—as this language has come to be known—did not, Breen takes pains to emphasize, originate in the marketplace. Rather, it grew out of a liberal tradition that, as Breen has elaborated elsewhere, owed much to the seventeenth-century political theorist John Locke. Yet, it was consumer politics, or so Breen contends, that rendered this language vivid and compelling. The shared experience of purchasing and using English store-bought goods—and nothing else—established the necessary "foundation of widespread trust" that invested with meaning the "principled declarations that dominate our own memory of national independence" (p. 200).

This trust was so pervasive in large part because consumer choice was, or so Breen posits, resolutely egalitarian. Like Daniel Boorstin—whose celebration of 'consumption communities' in The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1974), Breen's account in this way curiously...