Consumer Virtues in Revolutionary America?

T. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xviii + 380 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00.

It was, as I remember it, a swelteringly hot Philadelphia summer day. We were in a back lot near Front Street, digging down through the deposits of an old well for a salvage archaeology project, clearing the way for the construction of a parking lot. The upper layers presented a mass of tires, bricks, and beer bottles, but at the bottom we hit the mother lode. A foot of fine gray clay encapsulated an unbelievable mass of broken china and glassware, all dating to the 1760s. The finest porcelain, stemmed glasses, and basket-form fruit bowls in cream-colored earthenware, once gracing a fine Philadelphia table, had been shattered and smashed as it was dumped down the well in a grand house cleaning, probably at the turn of the nineteenth century.

That same summer in 1977 Timothy Breen was probably already thinking about the power of such things in their eighteenth-century settings. The Marketplace of Revolution is the culmination of an epic series of projects on material life in eighteenth-century America beginning with his work on self-presentation, agriculture, and debt among the pre-revolutionary Virginia gentry, running through a sequence of landmark, classic essays on culture and revolution.¹ In essence, Breen's argument is that the coming of the American Revolution cannot be understood without a consideration of the scope, scale, and penetration of a prior consumer revolution, as Americans from the 1740s were drawn into the advancing juggernaut of British manufactured goods, a sensuous stream of textile, ceramic, glass, metal-wares, and printed goods that reached into virtually every American household. These goods—objects of desire and avenues of choice—revolutionized American life before the Revolution itself. They became a common ground of American identity, a materialized "imagined community," that, Breen argues, determined the shape and trajectory of the evolving revolutionary mobilization. Plates, cloth, and household experience, rather than simply pamphlets, speeches, and political principles, mobilized Americans to resist British tyranny to the point of rebellion, independence, and political revolution. Breen's long-awaited magnum opus sets forth his argument in full and splendid detail. It is a book that is bound to set off debate.

The Marketplace of Revolution is organized into two sections, in turn describing the eighteenth-century "empire of goods" and the political and cultural dynamics of the non-importation movements between 1765 and 1775. Breen carefully eases his reader into what will be a densely detailed argument by way of two openers: an introduction to "The Revolutionary Politics of Consumption" and a first chapter providing a "Tale of the Hospitable Consumer: A Revolutionary Argument." These prologia allow Breen to back into his discussion, presenting his conclusions about revolutionary mobilization before he leads his reader through the marvels of the late colonial marketplace. Thus in his introduction, after a brief view of a display of imported ceramics at Colonial Williamsburg, Breen states his thesis in terms that will be helpful for those of us who like to counterpose in our teaching David Hackett Fischer's colonial diversities with Jack Greene's colonial convergence: "the colonists' shared experience as consumers provided them with the cultural resources need to develop a bold new form of political protest. In this unprecedented context, private decisions were interpreted as political acts; consumer choices communicated personal loyalties. Goods became the foundation of trust, for one's willingness to sacrifice the pleasures of the market provided a remarkably visible and effective test of allegiance" (p. xv-xvi).² This theme is developed more extensively in the ensuing introductory chapter. Here Breen sets himself off from both the ideological school's emphasis on the traditions of English Whiggery and the progressive historians' focus on class. Neither political pamphlets nor class grievance, he argues, begin to explain the breadth and depth of American mobilization...