The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (review)

For more than twenty years, social and political historians of the early American republic have employed the term market revolution to describe the rapid economic and social transformations that the United States underwent between the Revolution and the Civil War. Introduced by Sean Wilentz, Charles Sellers, and others, the concept has been challenged by scholars including Daniel Walker Howe and Daniel Feller; indeed, this reviewer has expressed skepticism about it. But a generation of historians now has employed the term constructively as a device with which to think about the dramatic changes of the period, their character and causes. Many of them published their work in the Journal of the Early Republic, of which for ten years John Lauritz Larson was co-editor. Larson, also author of two previous books and many articles on American economic history, has now contributed this volume to the Cambridge University Press "Essential Histories" series, aimed at providing critical introductions to major historical themes. He offers a fine, clear, lively, and thought-provoking overview of his topic that is not only the best now available but likely to survive the test of time.

While acknowledging that the concept of a Market Revolution has been subject to warm debate, Larson avoids getting bogged down in the particulars; for readers wishing to delve further he indicates some of the major points of contention and provides a good bibliographical essay. Nevertheless, he offers a clear rationale for employing the term. Over this period, he suggests, market dealings, connections, and dependencies, once associated with mercantile capitalism, spread to shape everyday life for most "ordinary" Americans. Responsiveness to markets and their demands also promoted the technical, organizational, and social changes that fostered territorial expansion, commercialized agriculture, manufacturing developments, transportation improvements, urbanization, and new methods of finance. By the 1850s, Larson suggests, the elements of U.S. capitalism had largely fallen into place. In broad but precise brushstrokes, Larson delineates the different elements and regional characteristics of these changes, and captures contemporaries' sense of the breathtaking pace at which they seemed to occur. He also notes key interconnections, for instance between commercial growth, the spread of newspapers (carriers inter alia of commercial information), and developments in paper making.

Larson demonstrates why economic and development issues were at the heart of U.S. political activity and debate during the period. Unlike some earlier exponents of a Market Revolution thesis, he interprets political conflicts not as between "forward-looking" and "backward-looking" groups, but between exponents of centrally-conceived and guided programs, such as Henry Clay's "American system" of federally-funded internal improvements, and those of "individualism, localism, and libertarianism" (22), who supplied much of the energy behind nineteenth-century developments and helped unleash a "steady privatization of economic life" (23). Among the book's strengths is its introduction to the different traditions in economic theory, from Adam Smith and his critics onwards, that influenced both contemporary political debates and historical interpretations of the Market Revolution and its characteristics. Larson traces in this nineteenth-century transformation not only the economic and social changes and disruptions he outlines, but what his subtitle calls "the eclipse of the common good," the replacement of republican notions of community interest and virtue with a liberal emphasis on individual action and freedoms. He addresses the long-standing debate about the relationship between capitalism and slavery by treating the slave South as a set of "variations" on the general (presumably Northern) pattern. He suggests how conflicts over slavery (resulting ultimately in the Civil War) honed the concept of "freedom" into narrowly drawn definitions of property ownership and wage earning that cohered with the liberal ideology of a market-based political economy.

Larson balances a long chapter on the "marvelous improvements" (46) of the antebellum period with another outlining the stories of the many groups—farmers, artisans, factory-operatives, women, Native Americans, African Americans (free and enslaved)—whom these changes challenged, disrupted...