Market Revolution Research Articles

Book Review of, Words Marked by a Place: Local Histories in Central Oregon

549 Reviews 548 OHQ vol. 119, no. 4 He became president of a bank, a position that suited the silver-tongued autocrat’s desire for the good life. Nokes has crafted an engaging portrait of an often-unlikable figure, and the book will likely appeal to a general audience. Some of the stand-alone chapters, particularly those on the Donner Party and the 1859 Broderick-Terry duel, are fascinating but somewhat disconnected from the main narrative. Nokes finds in Burnett a useful through-line to connect the early political histories of Oregon and California . One problem, however, with Nokes’s focus on the machinations of elite individuals is that he seldom examines Burnett’s life — and his commitment to ethnic cleansing, racial exclusion , and wealth accumulation — within the context of broader nineteenth-century historical processes, such as the emergence of settler colonialism and the market revolution. The limited scope of the political history also leaves major historical questions unasked and unanswered . For instance, Nokes fails to address why Oregonians repeatedly embraced Black exclusion laws while Californians consistently rejected them. Still, Nokes is an unpretentious and witty writer with an ear for a good story. Moreover, he had to rely on Burnett’s own self-serving writings for the bulk of his primary research, and he approached these texts with laudable skepticism. Ken Coleman Portland, Oregon THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK: THE KU KLUX KLAN OF THE 1920S AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Linda Gordon Liveright Publishing Corp., a division of W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2017. Illustrations, notes, index. 288 pages. $27.95 cloth. How did the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) of the 1920s gain so many members and influence politics? Distinguished historian Linda Gordon draws on others’ work and her own original research to document why the Klan “owed much of its considerable electoral success to nonelectoral activities that signaled its mass following” (p. 164). She takes readers on a vivid and disturbing tour of Klan recruitment, rallies, and lobbying, and builds to a finale where the KKK disrupts the 1924 Democratic National Convention. Gordon distinguishes the twentieth century KKK from the original post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan, which mobilized white former Confederates to intimidate freed people. The modern Klan invoked this history, especially when screening D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic, Birth of a Nation. But the new KKK was a national organization, run from the top down by key leaders who profited from selling dues and regalia. The main tenets of KKK ideology were racism (especially white supremacy); nativism (that fueled anti-Catholicism and antiSemitism ); temperance; fraternalism; Christian evangelicalism; and populism. The modern Klan advocated vigilante violence and political terrorism, and its national reach and broad popularity made it a very effective political lobby. Klan supporters upheld Jim Crow and opposed immigration, championed Prohibition , lobbied against parochial schools, and advocated forced sterilization. The Klan was not confined to small-town America. Gordon demonstrates that “it was in cities and states that the Klan amassed its greatest dominance” (p. 170). Who joined? The modern Klan signed up white male (and female) native-born Protestants , and targeted African Americans, immigrants , Catholics, Jews, and others. Shared ideology was important, but Gordon shows readers that the KKK’s real strength was social networking. There was also a financial motive: any Klan member could become a recruiter and secure a share of the fees paid by those they converted. This incentive prompted like-minded people to utilize their political, social, religious, and family networks to find new Klansmen. The organization soon boasted impressive numbers. Membership was an open secret: the Klan was a public and political presence. The Klan roiled the 1924 Democratic National Convention, fueled by hatred of Catholic, anti-Prohibition contender Al Smith, whose nomination they helped to defeat. Even those who did not support the KKK feared their influence: “Neither major political party, and none of the presidents in this period . . . could be persuaded to condemn the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 165). Gordon emphasizes the emotional appeal of this new Klan, and the “structures of feeling” they manipulated. Local leaders sponsored widely advertised mass entertainments, including picnics with free food and airshows that featured a...

Neoliberalism's World Order

Neoliberalism has many histories. Milton Friedman, the Chicago school, Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan's market revolution, IMF structural adjustment, and shock therapy transition programs for the post-Communist states are all fixtures in the narrative of the neoliberal turn. If we wind the clock back to the aftermath of the Second World War, we can see various precursors already familiar to scholars. Globalists is important because it provides a new historical framing. For Slobodian, the earliest and most authentic brand of neoliberalism was defined by its preoccupation with the question of world economic integration and disintegration. Their advocacy for free trade and the liberalization of capital movement goes back to the wake of the First World War and the ruins of the Habsburg empire. Neoliberals set out not to demolish the state but to create an international order strong enough to contain the dangerous forces of democracy and encase the private economy in its own autonomous sphere.

The Readers' South: Literature, Region, and Identity in the Civil War Era

This essay examines the reading habits of young white southern readers, a segment of the region's educated class who frequently wrote about their reading habits in diaries. Analysis of these readers, ranging in age from early teens to early twenties, reveals that reading provided considerable continuity across periods. Young men and women socialized as readers in the antebellum years carried with them certain cultural assumptions about literature, literacy, and reading as they headed into secession and war. These assumptions included attitudes about reading for self-improvement and anxiety about appropriate genre selection as related to age, class, and gender. Heightened sectionalism, secession, and the war caused young men and women to adjust antebellum modes of thought and engagement with intellectual life to wartime exigencies. Accordingly, this essay explores how southerners used their literacy, and how they experienced intellectual life across eras, moving from the Market Revolution through secession, and into war. This cultural history of intellectual life should challenge historians to reexamine the era's conventional periodization as well as its claims about southern regional exceptionalism.

Words Marked by a Place: Local Histories in Central Oregon by Jarold Ramsey

549 Reviews 548 OHQ vol. 119, no. 4 He became president of a bank, a position that suited the silver-tongued autocrat’s desire for the good life. Nokes has crafted an engaging portrait of an often-unlikable figure, and the book will likely appeal to a general audience. Some of the stand-alone chapters, particularly those on the Donner Party and the 1859 Broderick-Terry duel, are fascinating but somewhat disconnected from the main narrative. Nokes finds in Burnett a useful through-line to connect the early political histories of Oregon and California . One problem, however, with Nokes’s focus on the machinations of elite individuals is that he seldom examines Burnett’s life — and his commitment to ethnic cleansing, racial exclusion , and wealth accumulation — within the context of broader nineteenth-century historical processes, such as the emergence of settler colonialism and the market revolution. The limited scope of the political history also leaves major historical questions unasked and unanswered . For instance, Nokes fails to address why Oregonians repeatedly embraced Black exclusion laws while Californians consistently rejected them. Still, Nokes is an unpretentious and witty writer with an ear for a good story. Moreover, he had to rely on Burnett’s own self-serving writings for the bulk of his primary research, and he approached these texts with laudable skepticism. Ken Coleman Portland, Oregon THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK: THE KU KLUX KLAN OF THE 1920S AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Linda Gordon Liveright Publishing Corp., a division of W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2017. Illustrations, notes, index. 288 pages. $27.95 cloth. How did the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) of the 1920s gain so many members and influence politics? Distinguished historian Linda Gordon draws on others’ work and her own original research to document why the Klan “owed much of its considerable electoral success to nonelectoral activities that signaled its mass following” (p. 164). She takes readers on a vivid and disturbing tour of Klan recruitment, rallies, and lobbying, and builds to a finale where the KKK disrupts the 1924 Democratic National Convention. Gordon distinguishes the twentieth century KKK from the original post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan, which mobilized white former Confederates to intimidate freed people. The modern Klan invoked this history, especially when screening D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic, Birth of a Nation. But the new KKK was a national organization, run from the top down by key leaders who profited from selling dues and regalia. The main tenets of KKK ideology were racism (especially white supremacy); nativism (that fueled anti-Catholicism and antiSemitism ); temperance; fraternalism; Christian evangelicalism; and populism. The modern Klan advocated vigilante violence and political terrorism, and its national reach and broad popularity made it a very effective political lobby. Klan supporters upheld Jim Crow and opposed immigration, championed Prohibition , lobbied against parochial schools, and advocated forced sterilization. The Klan was not confined to small-town America. Gordon demonstrates that “it was in cities and states that the Klan amassed its greatest dominance” (p. 170). Who joined? The modern Klan signed up white male (and female) native-born Protestants , and targeted African Americans, immigrants , Catholics, Jews, and others. Shared ideology was important, but Gordon shows readers that the KKK’s real strength was social networking. There was also a financial motive: any Klan member could become a recruiter and secure a share of the fees paid by those they converted. This incentive prompted like-minded people to utilize their political, social, religious, and family networks to find new Klansmen. The organization soon boasted impressive numbers. Membership was an open secret: the Klan was a public and political presence. The Klan roiled the 1924 Democratic National Convention, fueled by hatred of Catholic, anti-Prohibition contender Al Smith, whose nomination they helped to defeat. Even those who did not support the KKK feared their influence: “Neither major political party, and none of the presidents in this period . . . could be persuaded to condemn the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 165). Gordon emphasizes the emotional appeal of this new Klan, and the “structures of feeling” they manipulated. Local leaders sponsored widely advertised mass entertainments, including picnics with free food and airshows that featured a...

From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York by Valerie H. McKito

Reviewed by: From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York by Valerie H. McKito Heather Schwartz From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York. By Valerie H. McKito. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015, 248 pages, $24.95 Paper. In the abundance of scholarship on the American Revolution, Loyalist studies form a niche in the field that has received increasing attention of late. Recent books by historians such as Maya Jasanoff, Ruma Chopra, and Judith Van Buskirk have focused mainly on Loyalist motivations, both political and practical, or the diaspora of Loyalists who evacuated by force or choice to other parts of the British Empire. Yet, Loyalists who eventually returned to the United States and reintegrated into society remain understudied. In From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The DePeyster Family of New York, Valerie H. McKito confronts this crucial question: how and why did Loyalists return to their former homes and successfully assume the mantle of Republican citizenship? While historians have long understood that Loyalists played an important role in the founding of Canada, McKito argues that they were also "inexorably intertwined" with the formative period of the United States (2). McKito examines the logistical processes of exile and reintegration via the compelling case study of Frederick DePeyster (1758–1834), fourth son of a prominent Dutch family in New York City. Like his three brothers, James, Jr., Abraham, and Joseph Reade, Frederick fought for Britain during the Revolution. He served first in the Nassau Blues, then as an officer in the King's American Regiment. When the British evacuated New York following the Treaty of Paris, Frederick and his brothers—banished due to their military service—sailed with the last fleet to Canada in November 1783. While in exile, Frederick cultivated wealth and influence as a merchant [End Page 469] and landowner in New Brunswick, guided by expectations of elite status and aided by his family name as well as his military land grant and pension. In 1793, shortly after New York lifted legal restrictions against Loyalists, Frederick, then thirty-five, returned to reinstate his family's standing among New York City's upper echelon. This move coincided with improved trade prospects in New York as well as his auspicious marriage to Helen Hake. McKito infers that Frederick made a calculated, primarily economic decision to return at a propitious moment. Readers hoping for a study of Loyalist ideology will be disappointed, as McKito argues that self-interest rather than political conviction motivated the DePeysters' choices during and after the American Revolution. She reconstructs the story of a family that chose sides based on what seemed to offer the surest means of securing the wealth, reputation, and influence they had steadfastly built. Frederick and his father, James, like other residents of the port city of New York, believed the sound decision was to side with an empire that facilitated the expansion of their ever-growing fortune as merchants in an Atlantic economy. This focus on interest rather than politics may derive, in part, from the limitations of McKito's primary sources, principally the DePeyster Family Papers at the New York Historical Society. During the War of 1812, with the British Army marching through the capital, Frederick DePeyster burned papers related to the family's former Loyalist leanings. Given New York City's vulnerability during the war, these papers could have compromised the family's credibility, but whether they contained any indication of political or personal fealty cannot be surmised. This book is ambitious in scope, as McKito traces multiple generations of DePeysters from the arrival of Johannes to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1647 through Frederick's term as patriarch until his retirement in 1820 and Frederick, Jr.'s subsequent leadership. With such an extensive chronology, McKito's appendices of DePeyster genealogy prove invaluable. She draws heavily from a wide range of secondary sources in her engrossing account of change in New York and the broader Atlantic World from an early modern economy through the dynamic period of the market revolution. Throughout this odyssey, she touches on a multitude of topics, including Dutch culture, trade, slavery, and European war. The strength of...

The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by Peter Guardino

Reviewed by: The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War by Peter Guardino Maria Angela Diaz (bio) The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War. By Peter Guardino. ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 512. Cloth, $39.95.) Like other historians who tackle the subject of the Mexican War, Peter Guardino begins his work by noting that both the United States and Mexico have a historical blind spot when it comes to the war. The Dead March is a masterful telling of the Mexican-American War that blends together the stories of the United States and Mexico as they went to war from 1846 to 1848. It provides a cultural and social history of the war that focuses primarily on what Guardino refers to as the "experiences and motivations of Mexicans and Americans of relatively modest social status, the men and women who did the hardest work and faced the greatest risks not only in Mexican and American armies but also in Mexican and American societies" (4). The Dead March is an example of the "new military history" that incorporates elements of cultural and social history to add context to the experience of war. Through the experiences of men and women in Mexico and the United States, the book takes aim at the reasons behind the outcome of the war, addressing the question of why one side lost and one side won. Guardino sets out to address the theory that Mexico lost the war because it was not as strong of a nation and had less of a sense of itself as a nation than the United States. He focuses on the United States and Mexico not as many nationalist boosters wanted to see them, but "as they were" in the nineteenth century (7). Guardino notes that even historians often fall into the [End Page 526] habit of comparison when it comes to the two countries during this period. Such comparisons often imply one's fitness as a nation and the other's lack of nationalism. The reality, according to Guardino, is that the United States was not nearly as cohesive a nation as its proponents made it out to be, a truth that would become evident once it experienced the Civil War. Mexico was a heavily divided nation, but still Mexicans possessed a national identity before the war that helped them sustain their fight. Mexicans at all levels of society invested time and energy into fighting the war. Guardino notes that President James K. Polk and his supporters hoped for a short war, yet the national fealty of Mexicans sustained the army and the war for two long years. Their interpretation of the nation was based on much more local concerns, such as protecting their homes, families, and the Catholic religion. For Guardino, the reason that Mexico lost the war was its lack of resources, which is a much more plausible argument than one emphasizing a lack of nationalism. The American economy in the 1840s was far larger than that of Mexico, and the U.S. government was propped up by the enormous resources at its disposal as a result of the market revolution that began decades before the war. Mexicans' national commitment to the war, however, consistently thwarted Americans' preconceived notions of them and their own ability to bring the war to a swift and tidy end. Their notions were grounded in ideas about gender, race, and religion. This conception of American racism toward Mexicans has been discussed in other works considering U.S. Mexican relations, yet Guardino complicates them by noting that Mexicans responded to accusations of effeminate men, criminality, and Catholicism. Mexicans articulated counterarguments that denounced American religious diversity, immigrant populations, and territorial greed. The Dead March follows several other studies of the Mexican-American War, such as Amy Greenberg's A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (2012) and Brian DeLay's War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (2008). These studies address specific aspects of the Mexican-American War and are primarily focused on the United States or Southwest Borderlands. Guardino draws on these studies and...

産業革命と市場問題 : 問題提起 (産業革命と国内流通機構 日本とイギリスの比較市場(いちば)史)

産業革命と市場問題 : 問題提起 (産業革命と国内流通機構 日本とイギリスの比較市場(いちば)史)

Here Comes the Hyper-Connected Augmented Consumer

Abstract Consumers have become always on and constantly connected. Search costs have plummeted, individuals’ abilities to digitally express themselves and their opinions increased, and the opportunities for superior business and market intelligence for companies have skyrocketed. This has given rise to more, richer, and new sources of consumer data that marketers can leverage, and has fueled the data-driven insights revolution in marketing. But there is more to come very soon. In marketing, we are quickly moving from the age of the connected consumer to the age of the augmented consumer. New technologies like wearable devices, smart sensors, consumer IoT devices, smart homes, and, critically, artificial intelligence ecosystems will not only connect, but will substantially and meaningfully augment the consumer in terms of their thoughts and behaviors. The biggest challenge for marketers will lie in how they approach marketing to this new type of consumer, particularly personal artificial intelligence ecosystems. This means marketing to algorithms, instead of people, and that is very different to how most marketing work is currently done.

Economia colaborativa: reflexões a partir da literatura

Oportunidades, negócios e revoluções econômicas e mercadológicas estão surgindo a partir das contribuições geradas por agentes individuais e organizacionais que estão vivendo uma nova dinâmica cada vez mais complexa e mutante. Dessa forma, surge uma tendência econômica definida como economia do compartilhamento, representada por um novo cenário em que os consumidores, ao invés de depositar produtos em suas casas, iniciam um processo de compartilhamento. A propagação desse comportamento econômico desenvolveu no mundo todo o consumo colaborativo, definido como práticas de compartilhamento tradicional, tais como escambo e doação, que, a partir da disseminação da Internet, das tecnologias e dos dispositivos móveis, estão cada vez mais presentes no cotidiano. Nesse artigo, o objetivo é apresentar uma revisão de 23 estudos internacionais e 2 nacionais que contribuem nesse contexto. É realizada uma revisão na literatura em administração e negócios a fim de se apresentar os principais conceitos abordados como um breve percurso histórico das recentes pesquisas e seus pressupostos teóricos, metodológicos e empíricos. Ao final, serão exploradas as principais implicações e lacunas que possam contribuir para o campo da administração no que se refere à economia colaborativa.

The “quiet revolution” in the aquaculture value chain in Bangladesh

The study has produced a single, powerful finding: the fish value chain in Bangladesh is growing and transforming very rapidly, in all segments. (1) The quiet revolution in the fish value chain is a domestic market revolution: 94% of aquaculture production is destined for domestic consumption. (2) The farmed fish market grew by a factor of 25 times in three decades to nearly 2milliontons today. At most 10% of farmed fish are home-consumed, the rest are marketed. 42% of marketed farmed fish is consumed in urban areas and that share is growing fast. (3) There has been a tripling of volumes and actors in all the segments of the value chain over the past decade. (4) There has been rapid capital deepening in the form of investments by hundreds of thousands of actors in the fish value chain; apparent in a great jump in feed use, investment in equipment and pond construction, and investments in mills, hatcheries and vehicles. These investments have been made by, and provided opportunities for, a multitude of smallholder farmers and small and medium enterprises throughout the chain. (5) There has been diversification and specialization beyond carps into production of commercial species such as tilapia and pangasius catfish, which have raised yields and helped to move the fisheries sector along the “product cycle.” (6) So far the quiet revolution is driven by increase in demand, improvement in infrastructure, and investments by small-scale actors apart from large feed mills. Very little change is due to imposition of standards and contracts, or NGO or government action (except initial government support at the earliest stages in the 1980s). The most important policy has been infrastructure investment, good business environment, and laissez faire policy in terms of crop choice of farmers. Statement of relevanceThis study focuses on the transformation of aquaculture in Bangladesh, a dynamic sector that has been driven by investments of hundreds of thousands of mainly small actors in the fish value chain. Investments that have bolstered the diversification beyond the production of carps, into production of new commercial species, raising yields and then reducing the price of consumed fish over time.

Observing Manners in Hawthorne'sBlithedale

In a backhanded but perceptive apologia for the "triumph ... of the provincial perspective" in Hawthorne's Our Old Home (1863), Henry James explains that his precursor "had in mind the array of English voyagers--Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss Martineau, Mr. Grattan"--whose widely-read and frequently acerbic commentaries on America had set the tone for transatlantic travel writing. Provincial or not, Hawthorne could hardly be blamed for observing "the amenities of criticism" (145) established by such writers at dyspeptic intervals in his English sketches. Several moments in The Blithedale Romance suggest that Hawthorne had British criticisms of America in mind already in 1851, as he revisited the Utopian experiment in social equality that he had imprudently invested in at Brook Farm. More specifically, as this essay argues, The Blithedale Romance reflects on a prolific Anglo-American controversy concerning the significance of American manners as indicators of democracy's actual and potential success. In the ironic etiquette-consciousness that pervades his recollections of Blithedale, Miles Coverdale bears a striking resemblance to British travelers who described the United States as a failed utopia long before the Civil War threatened, as Hawthorne put it to Franklin Pierce in the opening dedication of Our Old Home, to reduce "our nation and its polity" to "the fragments of a shattered dream" (5:4). Debates on the "Condition-of-America Question" (as Elizabeth Deis and Lowell Frye have called it (1)) attracted diverse American participants whose contributions reflected durably colonial anxieties, but also the market revolution's rapid transformation of urban middle-class life, and the antebellum reform movement's hopeful, if heterogeneous visions of moral and social progress. As a result, a controversy about American manners entangled itself with topics that might well have seemed, and have surely come to seem, incalculably more urgent than etiquette: slavery, class relations, and women's rights, among others. (2) While they reveal a close familiarity with the variously-motivated observations of English travelers, the many comments on refinement and politeness in Blithedale refer as well to the views of American etiquette experts and social reformers, who spoke differently, if not always antithetically, to transatlantic evaluations of republican culture. At the nexus of the literatures of travel, conduct, and reform, my reading articulates the layered significances these literatures attached to the act of visiting, highlighting the complex sequence of visits that advances Hawthorne's plot. The arrivals and departures of the main characters, and the recognitions, salutations, and hospitalities they exchange, gracefully or otherwise, combine polite social calling, benevolent social intervention, and critical social observation. Where it stages these forms of visitation, The Blithedale Romance embroils its "visionary transcendentalists" (3:115) in a utopian tragicomedy of manners with deceptively high stakes. Politeness, Refinement, and the Politics of Visitation On his original journey to a not-yet-failed utopia at some convenient distance from Boston, Hawthorne's narrator finds no well-wishers lining the path. The strangers that he and his companions meet and hail on that cold day remain unimpressed by their friendliness, and never promise to become fellow-travelers in any significant sense: Sometimes, encountering a traveller, we shouted a friendly greeting; and he, unmuffling his ears to the bluster and the snow-spray, and listening eagerly, appeared to think our courtesy worth less than the trouble which it cost him. The churl! He understood the shrill whistle of the blast, but had no intelligence for our blithe tones of brotherhood. This lack of faith in our cordial sympathy, on the traveller's part, was one among the innumerable tokens how difficult a task we had in hand, for the reformation of the world. …

The Panic of 1837 and the Market Revolution in America (a) and (B) (Abridged)

In 1837, President Martin Van Buren confronted a dilemma over the appropriate federal response to the recent panic of 1837 that seemed to undercut the policies and power of Andrew Jackson's “Democracy.” Now, Van Buren must decide how best to harness the civic reaction in stabilizing the financial system and returning the American economy to growth.Van Buren's dilemma occurs in the midst of a dramatic regime shift in American politics. The rise of Whig politicians in reaction to the populist policies of Andrew Jackson marked 1837 as an historic pivot-point. It is useful to consider how the panic of 1837 contributed to that pivot and how the subsequent civic reaction to the panic developed. ⦁The A case recounts the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his “war” on the Second Bank of the United States, a quasi-central bank. It also describes the “market revolution” occurring in the U.S. economy and the political factions that had emerged. Finally, it summarizes the causes and story of the panic of 1837. ⦁The B case presents draft legislation for an Independent Treasury and President Van Buren's message with which he aimed to open a special session of the U.S. Congress and enact the Independent Treasury proposal. ⦁The C case describes the failures to enact the proposal in 1837, 1838, and 1839—ultimately the proposal was enacted in 1840. The case also describes other civic reactions: a new Bankruptcy Act and state-level “free banking” laws. Finally, the case describes the economic aftermath: another panic in 1839 and a long depression that ensued. Excerpt UVA-F-1806 Sept. 20, 2017 The Panic of 1837 and the Market Revolution in America (A) and (B) (Abridged) Within weeks of Martin Van Buren's inauguration as the eighth U.S. president on March 4, 1837, a bank panic broke out in New York and other eastern cities. On May 15, 1837, Van Buren called for a special session of Congress to convene in September for the purpose of addressing the crisis. Rumors circulated about what Van Buren would propose to remedy the situation. Van Buren was perplexed himself and agonized over how best to respond. Advice, much of it unsolicited, streamed in: Recharter the Second Bank of the United States (Second Bank). Some advocates, not least of them Nicholas Biddle, the former president of the bank, claimed that the panic had its origins in the lax credit standards of banks in the West and the South. After losing its national charter in 1836, the bank had lost its ability to discipline other banks in the system. Thus, the path to recovery would entail rechartering the Second Bank to provide the systemic oversight that the nation needed. Prominent members of the Whig Party supported this. . . .

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

Reviewed by: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Thomas Coens (bio) The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 768. $37.50 cloth) Despite being, to all appearances, among the heroes of American history, abolitionists have not always been looked upon kindly by American historians. In the estimation of many, if not most, historians writing in the century after the Civil War, they were self-righteous meddlers, at whose feet was placed a large share of the responsibility for plunging the nation into civil war. Skepticism about abolitionists, surprisingly, persisted long after the overt racism of the Dunning and Phillips schools was replaced in the 1960s and 1970s with more sympathetic attitudes toward the plight of African American slaves. In The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), David Brion Davis famously argued that abolitionists performed ideological dirty-work by valorizing free labor and thereby buttressing (if half-unwittingly) nascent capitalism. To Charles Sellers, and indeed to the entire generation of social historians whose work he synthesized in his Market Revolution (1991), abolitionists represented a “vanguard of capitalist liberalism”; their ostensible humanitarianism masked an agenda of cultural imperialism and “social control.” Denigration of abolitionism has abated somewhat in recent years, but it has by no means disappeared from within the profession. That abolitionist-bashing is still alive and well, at least in some quarters, is demonstrated [End Page 424] by Andrew Delbanco’s The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), which portrays antislavery crusaders as impatient zealots guilty of hastening an avoidable bloodbath. Rehabilitating the historical reputation of abolitionists is just one of the several accomplishments of Manisha Sinha’s magnificent new study The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. Drawing on an impressive array of both primary and secondary sources—the footnotes are truly a marvel to behold—it traces the abolition movement’s personnel, writings, and activities from the colonial period to the start of the Civil War. Sinha deftly combines a chronological approach, which allows her to move steadily forward in time, with chapters that treat one or another theme or issue, such as “The Woman Question,” “Fugitive Slave Abolitionism,” and “The Politics of Abolition.” According to Sinha, abolitionists were at the vanguard not of capitalism but of an expanded and more capacious conception of democracy and human rights. “Abolition was a radical, democratic movement,” Sinha writes at the start of her book, refusing to mince words about where she stands, one that “made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism.” “It is no coincidence,” she notes, “that the brief, incomplete triumph of the abolitionist vision resulted in the greatest expansion of American democracy, and that the demise of abolition went hand in hand with the greatest contraction of democracy” (pp. 3–4). Sinha’s association of abolitionism with democratization not only runs counter to historians’ traditional skepticism about abolitionists’ motives but also questions the dominant understanding within the profession of the three-way relationship between capitalism, democracy, and antislavery activism. The dominant “market revolution” school sees antebellum American democracy as evolving in reaction to and in tension with the rise of capitalism and tends to lump antislavery crusaders with the aiders and abettors of capitalism rather than of democracy. Because abolitionists professed to be advocates of liberty and equality for all, arguing that they were actually carrying water for industrialists has always been akin to pounding a square [End Page 425] peg into a round hole, with concepts like “false consciousness” and class “ideology” acting as the hammers. According to Sinha, this is all nonsense. Not only were abolitionists sincere and passionate small-d democrats, but closer attention to their writings shows that most excoriated the excesses of capitalism and the emerging culture of the market. Within many of her rapid-fire but colorful and evocative portraits of individual abolitionists, Sinha is quick to emphasize their tendency to condemn not just slaveholding but the larger sins of acquisitiveness and rapacity with which they associated it. The Quaker John Woolman, for example, denounced “luxuries and wealth, developing an incipient critique of market society,” the black...

The Panic of 1837 and the Market Revolution in America (a)

The Panic of 1837 and the Market Revolution in America (a)

“The Rag Race”: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam D. Mendelsohn

Reviewed by: “The Rag Race”: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam D. Mendelsohn R. William Weisberger “The Rag Race”: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire. By Adam D. Mendelsohn. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2015. 296pp. Cloth $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-4718-1.) This comparative history of the clothing business in America and in London is a detailed and a stimulating one. Adam D. Mendelsohn, who has also coedited Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History (2014) with Ava Kahn, lucidly presents an encompassing and absorbing study about American and British groups and institutions intimately associated with the clothing world. Chronologically and topically arranged into eight chapters, this suggestive monograph revolves around two theses: Jews occupied a dominant status in the manufacturing and marketing of garments in the Atlantic world and other places during the nineteenth century. His second thesis is that Jews filled an economic niche, greatly fostered merchant capitalism, and in many instances achieved social mobility. The participation of Jews in the clothing trade is extensively investigated in London and then in New York in the first two chapters. Mendelsohn shows that immigrants from central and eastern Europe did much to promote the garment business in both cities between 1840 and 1880. In London, they were purveyors of old clothes, working at clothes exchanges and street markets in Houndsditch and Rosemary Lane and selling, especially as peddlers and as a few wholesalers, such goods as used pants, shirts, sweaters, and jackets. They were involved also with the transatlantic secondhand clothing business; New York City evolved into a used clothing hub. Many peddlers, some wholesalers, and a few retailers sold castoffs or used clothes in Chatham Street, thus transforming this city into a mecca of used clothing distribution and a locus of a specific kind of merchant capitalism. These groups in New York, like those in London, succeeded in establishing firm relations with both suppliers and creditors. Chapter 3 astutely demonstrates the growth of the American rag trade as a result of the marketing revolution and Western expansionism. Mendelsohn incisively explains that American peddlers especially benefited from developing cordial credit relationships with retailers, wholesalers, and a few manufacturers. [End Page 98] As an essential group, American peddlers also profited in purveying old and used clothes and other needed products to customers both in remote places and in booming regions. There is a fine section on Cincinnati as a major clothing distribution and marketing hub: Mendelsohn maintains that many itinerant salesmen flocked to the Queen City between 1830 and 1860, traveled throughout the midwestern and southern states, and accrued sizable profits in their dealings. As a result of their lucrative activities, peddlers transformed Cincinnati, which had 222 clothing factories and workshops, into a major garment center that was exemplified by the manufacturing firm operated by Jacob Seasongood and Phillip Heidelbach. Moreover, Mendelsohn believes that the success of these Jewish peddlers, as well as wholesalers and manufacturers, enabled the marketing revolution in Cincinnati, New York, and other American cities to flourish by 1860. Chapters 4 and 5 explain significant developments in the rag trade in Great Britain and in the British Empire. Mendelsohn describes how peddlers continued to accrue profits in east London. As well, he persuasively shows how Elias and Henry Moses, who were two wealthy Jewish peddlers, envisioned enormous potential in manufacturing and retailing clothing; they consequently became successful in manufacturing shirts, pants, and jackets and in selling these garments in their retail stores in London, other cities in Britain, and throughout the empire. Mendelson also explains that as fewer immigrants came to London during the 1870s, the British clothing business began to decline by the 1880s. The book’s last three chapters and conclusion reveal that expansion arose in the American garment business between 1860 and 1880. Mendelsohn explains that the Civil War produced an immense demand for military clothing and enabled numerous American Jews in the clothing world to become wealthy. He also believes that during the industrial era of the 1870s, American Jewish retailers and wholesalers prospered and that during the 1880s, Jewish manufacturers involved with...

The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (review)

Reviewed by: The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn Craig Hollander (bio) The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860. By Calvin Schermerhorn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 352. Cloth, $65.00.) Calvin Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism comes on the heels of much recent work on slavery’s extensive role in American economic development, including Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013), Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), and Damian Alan Pargas’s Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (2015). But this book does not deserve to fall by the wayside or be overshadowed by its predecessors. Scholars of slavery—especially those interested in the domestic slave trade—should push through any potential topic fatigue and read it. Despite its broad title, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism is really only about one component of the slavery business: the interstate slave trade. In other words, it is not about the foreign slave trade, the local slave trade, the rental market for slaves, or plantation administration. As Schermerhorn states up front, his book is primarily intended to detail how domestic slave-trading firms forcibly transported one million enslaved people from the mid-Atlantic states to the sugar- and cotton-growing regions of the lower Mississippi valley and Texas. Historians have long known the general contours of this commercial system. By focusing on one discrete subject per chapter, however, Schermerhorn is able to shed new light on how the interstate traffic worked in practice, from both an operational and a financial standpoint. In the process, he reveals that slave traders were savvy business insiders rather than social pariahs. According to Schermerhorn, slave-trading firms were also on the vanguard of the market revolution. His book therefore “examines progressions from sail to steam, rough trails to iron rails, and the financial wizardry that permitted enslavers to leverage their bondspersons on financial markets” (3). Schermerhorn is at his best when describing the effect of these “progressions” on the development of the domestic slave trade. He argues convincingly that interstate slave traders—at least the successful ones—were early [End Page 103] adopters and innovators who were quick to employ state-of-the-art modes of transportation, take advantage of government support, and create new financial instruments to facilitate their business operations. In that regard, they did more than traffic slaves from one region to another; they made markets more efficient, fostering the growth of American capitalism itself. For instance, it was a slave trader named Jean Baptiste Moussier who thought of the idea to enable members of an association of stockholders to leverage their own plantation property to buy similar assets (including slaves). Two financiers in New Orleans then used Moussier’s idea to create a property bank called the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana, which was backed by the state of Louisiana. The Consolidated Association sold bonds abroad, producing an explosion in credit among sugar planters, who, in turn, purchased more land, improved their plantations, and bought fresh slaves. Such tales of “financial wizardry”—the transfer of debt instruments from one party to another—might be difficult to follow, let alone explain. Thankfully, Schermerhorn is a very good storyteller and a strong writer, despite indulging in a convoluted metaphor or two. He is also careful not to lose sight of the victims while recounting how slave traders operated. Schermerhorn constantly reminds his readers that slave traders ripped apart families, committed appalling acts of brutality, and sexually assaulted their captives. Unlike some others, however, he resists the urge to wax eloquent about lashings, rape, and death. Instead, he mostly lets his sources do the talking for him. As a writer, then, Schermerhorn employs the same technique as the subject of one of his chapters: “I draw a veil over a scene,” wrote Solomon Northup, “which can better be imagined than described” (203). Northup’s considerable...

Early Modern Prostitutes, Concubines, and Mistresses

Early Modern Prostitutes, Concubines, and Mistresses Yasuko Sato (bio) Beverly Bossler. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000–1400. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. ix + 464 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-674-06669-3 (cl). Nina Kushner. Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xi + 295 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-801-45156-6 (cl). G. G. Rowley. An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-Century Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. xviii + 255 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-231-15854-8 (cl). Amy Stanley. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xxii + 256 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-27090-8 (cl). The four books under review demonstrate noteworthy cross-cultural patterns in early modern prostitution and concubinage. Historical developments in Japan (Amy Stanley and G. G. Rowley), China (Beverly Bossler), and France (Nina Kushner) also present cross-national similarities and differences that explain why commodified sex flourished in the early modern period. These authors, although in varying degrees, address how the buying and selling of women’s sexuality was far from an isolated phenomenon. They offer useful insights into the dynamics of history surrounding the sexual commodification of women and its massive impact on familial relations. In the early modern era, as these works demonstrate, market-driven economies fueled the growth of lucrative sex markets and provoked destabilizing changes in the family. These four works capture both the alluring and the disturbing aspects of commercial sex but not in the same manner. Their focus varies from commoners to high-status social groups. Stanley undertakes a critical examination of the economic and social forces conducive to the exchange of sex for payment among common people. Rowley and Bossler address the privileges and hardships of elegant concubines in elite households. These analyses are mostly social, cultural, political, and literary, with the intent of contextualizing and reanimating the lives of these women. Kushner interprets [End Page 156] mistress-keeping and elite prostitution in a positive light, and her principal concern is with how sociocultural phenomena are representative of female agency. Amy Stanley’s Selling Women inquires into how the rapidly expanding market economy in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) was the major catalyst for the spread of Japan’s sex trade across the archipelago. Central to the Tokugawa system of political control was the “alternate attendance” policy, which required the daimyō (regional lords) to reside in the shogun’s capital of Edo (present-day Tokyo) every other year. During such a market revolution, women were circulated like “paper products, textiles, or lacquer bowls” and “became ‘famous products’ (meibutsu) of their region, akin to sake, buckwheat noodles, ceramic dishes, or paper umbrellas in other areas” (106; 108). Stanley is emphatic about the prevalence of commercial transactions to demonstrate that prostitution became a vast historically transforming force across Japan. She thus sees that prostitutes were both objects of exchange and economic actors. Stanley also highlights the massive economic contributions of “selling women” (baijo or baita) to government coffers as well as regional communities in Tokugawa Japan, using such historical references as legal codes, petitions, criminal records, town registers, and diaries. The first chapter of Selling Women is an analysis of Innai Ginzan, a silver mining town in the Akita domain where Umezu Masakage (1581–1633), Innai’s magistrate, collected levies from brothel keepers. Motivated by the exigencies of domain finance, Masakage confirmed the authority of men to sell or pawn female members of their households into prostitution. As this account illustrates, despite the shogunate’s laws that carefully separated prostitutes from all other female subjects, the pursuit of profit became prioritized over the paternalistic protection of non-prostitute females in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Neo-Confucian ideal of “benevolent government” was seriously undermined by the profitability of prostitution. Stanley delineates the process whereby the ravaging force of money and commodities prevailed against paternalistic government efforts to protect wives and daughters from sex for sale. The Tokugawa regime originally pursued a strategy of regulation through containment by locating the shogunate’s...

Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians by Angela Pulley Hudson

Reviewed by: Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians by Angela Pulley Hudson Adam Pratt (bio) Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians. By Angela Pulley Hudson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 270. Paper $29.95.) Angela Pulley Hudson’s Real Native Genius traces the lives of two individuals who, in the 1840s, convinced thousands of Americans that they were Native Americans. Calling themselves Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil, the couple toured the Northeast as musicians who performed for large audiences and, later, offered medical cures. Hudson argues that audiences took the couple’s Indianness seriously and offers a host of cultural factors, such as the market revolution and religious revivalism, that explain their success. What she finds is that the Indian portrayals by Warner McCary, a mixed-race former slave from Mississippi, and Lucy Stanton, a Mormon from New York, tapped into Americans’ perceptions of Native people. Their performances lacked authenticity, but they were readily believable [End Page 439] to an eastern, white audience that shared the same misconceptions about Native beliefs and practices. When evangelicals or early Mormons spoke in tongues, they were thought to be “talking Injun” (49); likewise, remedies hocked by charlatans were called “Indian cures” (124). These widely held ideas about a singular Native culture and identity, one that was widely constructed by white popular culture, allowed the couple to don identities believable enough to American audiences desperate for Native authenticity. Born a slave in Natchez, Mississippi, around 1810, Warner McCary had a sad childhood. His purported mother, a slave, and her other children were manumitted, while he was not. McCary long disputed the idea that his owner was his father and instead claimed a Choctaw father. Although McCary lacked a sense of belonging from his family, he found respite in the fact that, starting at a young age, he could please people by playing them music. By 1839, he had run away to New Orleans, where he became something of a renowned musician and fashioned a new identity for himself as a performer. Urged to travel to widen his audience, in 1843 he met Lucy Stanton, a divorcée with three children, whose life had been spent with the nascent Mormon Church. Because Native Americans “were seen as an essential part of the faith’s millenarian promise,” they played a vital role in Mormon theology (45). Mormonism, according to Hudson, was instrumental when it came to the couple’s adoption and perpetuation of ideas about Indians. In early 1846, the couple married and soon thereafter moved to Cincinnati, where they attempted to convert followers. McCary claimed to be both an Indian and a resurrected Christ, which caused several raised eyebrows. The local press portrayed McCary as “a unique sort of pied piper, leading followers to ruin and relieving them of their dollars” (72). This was the couple’s first foray into being “professional Indians,” an antebellum phenomenon that capitalized on “audiences’ desires for trivia on the vanishing race” (74–75). However, by early 1847 they had joined the Mormons at Winter Quarters, where they soon found themselves in trouble. It appeared that McCary had been seducing Mormon women with the help of his wife. McCary’s behavior, combined with lingering questions about his race, led to his being forced out of town by angry neighbors. By the fall of 1847, McCary and Stanton had traveled east and become professional Indians. Unlike so many Americans who chased their fortunes in the west, Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil understood that their brand could succeed only in the East. Impersonating Indians could work only where Indians [End Page 440] no longer existed and where misconceptions were widespread. In the East, Tubbee demonstrated his “native genius” when he performed renditions of “La Marseillaise,” a way to show that he was untaught and that he possessed natural gifts because of his heritage. After several years of touring, Tubbee became embroiled in controversy when he married another woman who was unaware of the fact that he already had a wife. As public opinion turned against him, he vanished, lost to the historical...

Distribution channels and internationalization in a developing-country clothing industry

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the distribution channels used by a Nigerian sample of apparel producers and investigate the association between the channels in use and the sample’s export involvement. In this era of sophisticated computer- and internet-mediated marketing practices, the larger proportion of entrepreneurs in developing economies still deploy largely informal marketing practices. Countries indeed have adopted the marketing revolution to varying degrees, consistent with prevailing level of development.Design/methodology/approach– A structured interview schedule was used in collecting data from 111 apparel entrepreneurs.Findings– Most of the respondents were domestic market-focused haute couture producers or low-volume producers of ready-to-wear (r-t-w) clothing who supply institutions or boutiques, using direct channels. Only a few export, mainly through ethnic-commercial networks involving overseas-based family/friends.Practical implications– For now, current distribution channels seem adequate for the personal and business goals of these entrepreneurs. However, large-volume clothing exporting through formal global distribution channels is what drives industrialization and development. These apparel entrepreneurs therefore require institutional assistance to link up with formal global marketing channels. It is only then that the industry would serve similar development roles as witnessed in other emerging economies which have climbed the development ladder through export of labour-intensive manufactures like clothing.Originality/value– The study confirmed earlier observations about apparel exporting in Nigeria, such as prevalent use of informal channels, and also draws attention to less-known details, including the existence of fledgling local trade intermediaries, “disappointed exporters” and an emerging group (yet miniscule) of exporters who utilize more formalized channels.

The Akron Offering: A Ladies’ Literary Magazine, 1849–1850 ed. by Jon Miller (review)

Reviewed by: The Akron Offering: A Ladies’ Literary Magazine, 1849–1850 ed. by Jon Miller Arielle J. Lester The Akron Offering: A Ladies’ Literary Magazine, 1849–1850. Edited by Jon Miller (Akron, Ohio: Univ. of Akron Press, 2013. 466pp. Paper $39.95, isbn 978-1-935603-53-5.) In this edited, periodical commentary, Jon Miller offers an insightful vignette on the intellectual, literary pieces The Akron Offering presented to its antebellum, largely female audience, which mirrored broader social issues such as public reforms, slavery, and women’s suffrage. The introduction analyzes problematic typographic errors that inundated print material throughout America, positing that many republished selections became victims of “textual corruption” by printers’ errors, often significantly impacting an original work’s interpretation and meaning (5). However, not all print errors resulted from ignorance or haste; some editors purposefully adulterated a submission to protest an author or his or her ideas. Moreover, pervasive written works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other national publications also contained careless orthography and printing errors, symptoms not anomalous to a regionalized periodical, but a result of rapid print demand and dissemination (19). Many middle-class women in mid-nineteenth-century America read the proliferation of prescriptive books, journals, and magazines meant wholly for female consumption during the “market revolution,” which significantly affected print culture with its mass distribution but also the influx of women agents as subscribers, writers, and public educators. Frequently used as a tool for social reform and reinforcing viewpoints on gender roles, ladies’ literary magazines held widely varied readerships in northern and midwestern states, such as The Akron Offering, hailing from northeastern Ohio. However, few accounts reveal the perspective of the rare, overtly criticized female editor who played a part in turning out edifying literature for other women. The Akron Offering’s editor, Calista Cumings, experienced a brief professional life printing her magazine from 1849 to 1850, compared to her contemporaries, Sarah J. Hale and Catharine Beecher, who spent many years employed as writers, educators, or editors. Miller illuminates that Cumings, like other female, middle-aged, or unmarried professional counterparts in her time, self-identified as anti-suffrage, [End Page 96] promoting traditional gender-role reinforcement in her writing, while in reality contributing to expanding women’s domain in the public sphere with her own professional and independent efforts. Cumings, although a noteworthy, progressive woman, fell through the cracks in the public historical records as an unmarried woman, a common oversight within government census data. Despite her short-lived success, Cumings and her contributors, many using pseudonyms or anonymity, stand as a reminder that many women participated and claimed a public voice in the midst of their own inner turmoil regarding their domestic duties and opinions on women’s “appropriate sphere” (29). Miller’s exceptional work as an editor contextualizes Akron’s place in ante-bellum society as a microcosm, a young city that flourished from the booming canal industry, burned with religious revivalism, and hosted a woman’s rights convention in 1851, complete with Sojourner Truth’s speech about being a woman and women’s intellect. The Akron Offering’s readers conveyed their sentiments on the California Gold Rush and the conversion of native Hawaiians, proving that virtually no literate American could be isolated from or apathetic toward national news and global events. Miller’s contribution to historical and literary scholarship effectively demonstrates the value of looking past popular, well-known periodicals at lost-and-found literature, exemplified by this annotated edition. Arielle J. Lester Youngstown State University Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press