The Market Revolution in Early America: An Introduction

Extract

For at least a dozen years now historians have talked about a “market revolution” that marked the history of the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Charles G. Sellers's book by that name (1991) suggests a particular, synthetic explanation of changes that reshaped American life during the so-called “Age of Jackson”; but other historians, before and since, have used the term a bit more loosely to refer to a host of developments that accompanied the spread of an expanding, ambitious, innovative, self-governing people across the early United States before the more dramatic advent of heavy industrialization in the post-Civil War era.

Without confining the term too precisely, any definition of “the market revolution” must center on the general displacement of traditional, cultural controls over production, distribution, and exchange—defining characteristics of so-called “early modern economies”—by market transactions governed almost exclusively by economic factors such as supply, demand, and price. To be sure, markets and exchange existed long before the nineteenth century and could be found, and still can be found, in societies that bear few marks of the modern capitalist system. Just as certainly, human behavior, even in the twenty-first century, never quite mirrors that exquisitely rational action predicted by freshman-level economics textbooks. But if we step back for perspective, it seems clear enough that sometime after the Revolution and before the Civil War Americans allowed market forces and market relations to banish all kinds of emotional attachments, customary rights, familial considerations, class and gender privileges that once had cushioned (or clouded?) their material interactions. Before the market revolution, who you were, where you were, and what you were still played a determining factor in how you bought, sold, and prospered. After the market revolution, money alone mobilized goods and people, no matter how grand or mean the owner of the purse.