The Market Revolution Ate My Homework

Abstract

The idea of a nineteenth-century market is now all the rage. Historians have acknowledged a post-1815 transportation revolution ever since George Rogers Taylor coined the term in 1951. But as Melvyn Stokes points out in his astute introduction to The Market Revolution in America, and as the book's subtitle reveals, the current concept goes much further. Built on the merger of two fashionable notions, the social transition to capitalism and the political change from republicanism to liberalism, the market has quickly grown to take in economics, law and politics, class relations, gender roles, slavery, religion, ideology-in short, just about everything. In Charles Sellers's epic synthesis, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991), the market bestrides the narrative as an omnipresent It, both a pervasive (and insidious) process and the crux of political, cultural, social, and religious controversy. Other works put Market Revolution in capitals and stretch its dates to bring an entire century's history under its sway. In 1994 some leading historians gathered in England to discuss this new concept. Their essays, revised and expanded in The Market Revolution in America, reveal its breadth of possibilities while also exposing some weaknesses. Christopher Clark's chapter on the North and Harry L. Watson's on the South, Amy Dru Stanley's on gender, and Eric Foner's and John Ashworth's on free labor ideology probe the market revolution's ramifications and consequences.' Donald J. Ratcliffe, Richard E. Ellis, and Michael F. Holt apply the market-revolution idea to politics. Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine question its application to religion, and Sean Wilentz (writing on