All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought

Abstract

With the nearly simultaneous publication ofT. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution and Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers'Republic, consumer interpretations of American history have come of age. Together these two monumental books erase any lingering doubt about the legitimacy of consumer history. They are capstones to an abundance of recent scholarship that has used the universal practice of consumption to examine, among other things, constructions of ethnicity and gender, the modernization of rural America, the leisure time of the industrial working class, and the character of contemporary politics. That Breen's book concerns the American Revolution while Cohen's covers post-World War II America suggests that consumers can stand as central characters across the span of the nation's past. Indeed, read together they suggest that consumption-how Americans have acquired and used goods not strictly necessary to biological existence-might well be the defining thread of American life. These are not just books: they are bookends.' If together these two consumer histories frame the historical life of the United States, they also stand at two ends of an interpretative spectrum concerning the historical consequences of consumption. At the heart of the different narratives are two opposing understandings of the nature of consumption: The one emphasizes the emancipatory potential of consumer choice for improving individual existence and challenging the status quo; the other a darker view of consumption as a process of manipulation buried within the larger system of social relations. T. H. Breen took the former view. He argued that the explosion of consumer choice in the mid-eighteenth-century colonies created the self-conscious citizen capable of revolutionary political action. Breen took as his point of departure the rather sudden appearance in the mid-eighteenth century of an empire of goods, whose existence he and his fellow consumer historians have established beyond dispute. The imperial market system made available to Britain's North American colonies a breathtaking variety of simple consumer goods. Colonists eagerly imported all Sorts of woolen cloath, Silks, Scythes, nails,