Synopses & Reviews
The Marketplace of Revolution offers a boldly innovative interpretation
of the mobilization of ordinary Americans on the eve of independence. Breen explores
how colonists who came from very different ethnic and religious backgrounds managed
to overcome difference and create a common cause capable of galvanizing resistance.
In a richly interdisciplinary narrative that weaves insights into a changing material
culture with analysis of popular political protests, Breen shows how virtual strangers
managed to communicate a sense of trust that effectively united men and women
long before they had established a nation. Breen argues that the colonists' shared
experience as consumers in a new imperial economy afforded them the cultural resources
that they needed to develop a radical strategy of political protest the
consumer boycott. Never before had a mass political movement organized itself
around disruption of the marketplace. As Breen demonstrates communal rituals of
shared sacrifice provided an effective means to educate and energize a dispersed
populace. The boycott movement the signature of American resistance--invited
colonists traditionally excluded from formal political processes to voice their
opinions about liberty and rights within a revolutionary marketplace, an open,
raucous public forum that defined itself around subscription lists passed door-to-door,
voluntary associations, street protests, destruction of imported British goods,
and incendiary newspaper exchanges. The Marketplace of Revolution explains
how at a moment of political crisis Americans gave political meaning to the pursuit
of happiness and learned how to make goods speak to power.
Review
"The author of this profoundly important book achieves what most historians only dream of. He propels forward to a new stage of understanding a subject the origins of the American Revolution that is large, complex and vexed by controversy." Publishers Weekly
Review
"This interesting work offers an original perspective and some provocative conclusions." Jay Freeman, Booklist
Review
"By emphasizing the egalitarian consequences of consumption, Breen vividly tells half of the story, obscuring the equal role of inequality in the consumer revolution....Breen aptly...tells the story of common aspiration but to the relative neglect of inequality's persistent power." Alan Taylor, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
T.H. Breen offers an innovative interpretation of the American Revolution as driven by the colonists' shared experience as consumers in an imperial economy, which led them to develop a radical strategy of political protest--the consumer boycott.
About the Author
T.H. Breen is William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. An authority on the culture and politics of the early Atlantic World, he has written six major books, including
Tobacco Culture and
Imagining the Past.