The Market Revolution

This is certainly an interesting book, if you can manage to make your way all the way through. His basic premise is that the United States possessed a pre-capitalist economy before the War of 1812 populated by tradition-bound yeoman who toiled on the land for subsistence living. After the conflict concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in 1815 and the Federalist Party disintegrated, the United States entered a period of profound economic transition from the pre-capitalist agricultural society toward a market based capitalist economy. He critiques the capitalist economy by presenting most ordinary Americans are resisting the market or being coerced into unskilled wage-labor when they could find no other options for work in a land-scare New England or specie-scarce South. By the end of the Civil War, Sellers suggests, the end of slavery and slaveocracy in the South made possible the market revolution's culmination in "unchallengeable bourgeois hegemony, moral and political" (p. 427).

Throughout the volume Sellers essentially details how the market economy (what he coined as the "market revolution") went from something unusual and unwanted toward a regular part of daily life most Americans took for granted. This is where other historians have heavily challenged his arguments about religion and culture, and his narrative sometimes borders on the bizarre. Let it suffice to say that he believes Antinomian and Arminian strands of religious thought (those that emphasized Justification by Faith or Justification by Works, respectively) culminated in the mythology of a self-made man who through his character and labor could achieve self-sufficiency in the capitalist economy. Unfortunately, most Americans could not achieve this "myth" and were beset with various anxieties and psychological maladies as they turned toward alcohol, suicide and other escapist fantasies. Sellers blames the market for causing this widespread discontent. Sellers (sometimes) persuasively demonstrates how middle-class pundits erected a broad edifice of science, medicine, pseudo-psychology, and religion that blamed individual failings and poverty not on structures of the market, but instead blamed the individual for not working hard enough, drinking too much, or being indolent. Those early nineteenth century ideas later found their corollary in the Republican Party's Free Labor ideology and Philosopher Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, both elaborating these basic principles of hard work and moral character leading to success, and poverty being the result of moral failing, laziness, or innate inferiority.

Other chunks of the volume cover Andrew Jackson's presidency and quickly moves through the presidencies of Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, and Polk to conclude with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the beginnings of a sectional crisis between the North and South.

Sellers' volume was initially slated for the Oxford History of the United States. However, because he focused too explicitly on the Market Revolution and the structural-functionalist approach to understanding how religion, politics, medicine, and science made capitalism palatable for ordinary Americans the editors at Oxford University Press decided to publish his volume independent from the series. Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007) later became the Oxford History of the United States' volume on Antebellum America. Howe contested Sellers on a point-by-point basis, and set his book up as the antithesis of Sellers' The Market Revolution by proposing instead a "Communications Revolution" and perceiving capitalism and technological innovation as inherently progressive. Because of this, Sellers' book changes pace and diction throughout. Most chapters are explicitly about economics and the social repercussions of capitalism—these are full of tedious explications of capitalism and philosophy that relies on some jargon often under explained. Other chapters take a broad historical narrative of the period, advancing generally moderate interpretations of politics and presidencies that other historians have expanded upon.

I wouldn't recommend this volume for anyone outside academic historians interested in this particular time period. Most interested readers could find a better, more accessible volume in Harry Watson's Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America or Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.