Putting Commerce in Its Place: Public Markets in U.S. History

Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Helen Tangires. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 265 pages. $45.00 (cloth).

Small-scale retailing is undergoing something of a resurgence in urban communities, a phenomenon visible in my own multiethnic Minneapolis neighborhood. Everywhere there are tiny stores that sell freshly made tortillas, injera, or Vietnamese pho. Most striking, however, are the many local "markets." Small retailers, most of them immigrants, have reclaimed abandoned office buildings and department stores and turned them into a Minneapolis version of open-air markets. Tiny outposts of tailoring, children's clothing, and money wirers vie with counters selling Salvadoran empanadas, Somali stews, and Mexican tamales. On weekends, these markets are dizzyingly crowded—far more difficult to park at than the so-called Mall of America. These places are aching to be written about. The lives lived there encompass gender performance, modern urban foodways, post-1965 immigration law, and the ongoing possibilities for entrepreneurship in the urban landscape, to name just a few themes.

The number and variety of these themes are no doubt suggested by the virtual explosion in the historical literature on consumption in recent years. Scholars of the United States have long paid attention to the cultural dynamics and significance of consumption and consumer culture.¹ Much of this work examines the role of consumption as a site of resistance to dominant discourses and systems of gender and class.² More recent work expands the literature on consumption to explore the ways in which it served as a focus for political activism and policy making. Work by Lizabeth Cohen and Alan Brinkley, for instance, has argued that the emergence of a consumption-based economy and culture in the twentieth century transformed Americans' conception and practice of citizenship.³ Other work by scholars in legal history has also forefronted the significance of consumption, here as a site of political economy and the testing grounds of democracy. William Novak's work on the regulatory nature of the nineteenth-century state and Barbara Welke's on railroad travel are both prime examples of this.⁴ Rather than defining a space apart from hierarchy and the state, much cultural performance seems to have been enmeshed in power and politics.

At its best and most adventurous this work problematizes an apolitical notion of culture, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) urging scholars to imagine the effects of cultural behavior on structures and power relations. This is an important innovation both in the stories we tell about American consumer culture and in the ways that historians conceptualize their projects. It suggests that consumption grounded American social and political institutions, but in unstable soil. Activities carried out in stores, streets, fairs, and public conveyances mattered not only to identity and group formation but also to hierarchy and the state. The literature has similarly exciting possibilities for scholars engaged in questions of political economy and state formation. It is no small thing to suggest, as much of this literature does, that the American state was formed around the mundane details of market exchange.

Of course, this work also raises any number of questions. Among the most compelling is the question of how markets, stores, businesses, and institutions actually functioned and mediated consumption. That is, in addition to the ways in which goods were used, how were they procured? Moreover, how did the ways in which they were procured affect their distribution, their use, and subsequent changes in commercial and political practices? With the important exception of Susan Porter Benson's study of work culture among department store clerks, there is surprisingly little literature on the social dynamics that informed interactions at the point of purchase. Exciting recent work on race and slavery does attend to relations in the very arena of purchase and exchange, but I would argue that these works are only beginning to be understood as studies...