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35-480: The term was widely popularized by Charles Grier Sellers (1927–2021), a leading historian of the Jacksonian period. His book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 portrayed it as a highly negative development that marked the triumph of capitalism over democracy . He argued that this was one of the most significant transformations of America within the first half of the nineteenth century—indeed,

70-467: A broken trigger on another musket. With interchangeable parts, however, all triggers fit the same model of the musket, as did all ramrods, all flash pans, all hammers, and all bullets. Manufacturers in many different industries soon took advantage of Whitney's invention to make a variety of goods with interchangeable parts. Many new products revolutionized agriculture in the West. John Deere, for example, invented

105-546: A more powerful economy, while most southern cities (with the marked exception of free labor metropolises like St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans) resisted the influence of market forces in favor of the region's slave system. It also was in part influenced by the need for national mobility, shown to be a problem during the War of 1812 , after which the government increased production of early roads, extensive canals along navigable waterways, and later elaborate railroad networks. Following

140-556: A new interpretation of the economic, social, and political events taking place during the United States' Market Revolution . Sellers was born in Charlotte, North Carolina , on September 9, 1923. His mother, Cora Irene (Templeton), worked for a church society; his father, Charles Grier Sellers, was an executive at Standard Oil and was descended from a family of "two-mule farmers". Sellers was an avid birder; in 1937, at age 14 he co-founded

175-575: Is an American historian who specializes in the early national period of U.S. history , with a particular interest in its intellectual and religious dimensions. He was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England (from 1992 to 2002 then Emeritus ) and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles . He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought (2007), his most famous book. He

210-459: Is what some historians of the U.S. call the market revolution. Historian Daniel Walker Howe challenges the Sellers' interpretation. First, Howe points out that the market revolution happened much earlier, in the eighteenth century. Second, Howe thinks Sellers errs in emphasis arguing that because "most American family farmers welcomed the chance to buy and sell in larger markets", no one was mourning

245-780: The Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University during the 1970–71 academic year. Sellers was a member of the Southern Historical Association , the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the American Historical Association (AHA). Sellers was arrested in the Jackson, Mississippi airport on July 21, 1961, as a part of the Freedom Rides . He

280-732: The Mecklenburg Audubon Club with Elizabeth Clarkson and Beatrice Potter, which later became the Mecklenburg Audubon Society . He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in History and Literature in 1947 (Class of 1945), graduating Magna Cum Laude. He lived in Grays Hall during his freshman year. His graduation was delayed until 1947 by service in the 85th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division (the ski troops) of

315-474: The United States Army . He served in the army from 1943 to 1945 and achieved the rank of staff sergeant. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1950. Sellers first worked as assistant professor in the history department of the University of Maryland from 1950 to 1951. He then taught at Princeton University for eight years. In 1958, he moved to

350-793: The University of California, Berkeley , where he was promoted to associate and then full professor. He taught there from 1958 to 1990. He was honored as a fellow by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1960 and 1961. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963. One year later, he was a visiting professor at El Colegio de Mexico . In 1967 he won the Bancroft Prize in American History for Volume II of his biography of President James K. Polk, titled James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843–1846 . He later served as

385-574: The War of 1812 , the American economy was altered from an economy dependent on imports from Europe to one that evolved greater internal production and commerce. In 1817 James Monroe replaced James Madison as president of the U.S.. The Democratic-Republicans continued policies begun in Hamiltons's administration. With a new generation of leaders, the Democratic-Republican Party came to embrace

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420-594: The North drastically increased, changing women and children's roles and further revolutionizing family structure, the demand for raw products such as cotton increased, meaning an increase in the South's demand for more labor. Ironically, this Northern demand for more cotton for the textile industry increased the Southern demand for slavery, making it harder for the North to end slavery in the South. This increase of labor and industry brought

455-486: The Oxford History of the United States series, but its criticism of the historiographical ideal of consensual, democratic capitalism in the U.S. led Oxford University Press to publish it outside the series. One of the book's central arguments is that historians have largely ignored "the stressed and resistant Jacksonian majority", choosing instead to sing the praises of capitalism and ignore the evidence that democracy in

490-695: The U.S. rose largely in resistance to capitalism, rather than in accord with it. Sellers' book – which synthesized a wealth of extremely diverse sources to make its case – has profoundly impacted all subsequent debates surrounding the Market Revolution in the United States. Sellers was married three times. His first two marriages ended in divorce. He was married to Carolyn Merchant until his death. He had three children. Sellers died on September 23, 2021, in Berkeley, California , aged 98. Daniel Walker Howe Daniel Walker Howe (born January 10, 1937)

525-522: The Union and when Missouri petitioned for statehood in 1819, the issue of slavery was thrust on the national agenda. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the issue awakened him "like a fire bell in the night." That the Missouri question coincided with the nation's worst financial crisis awakened anxieties in many Americans. By the 1820s Americans recognized a rough regional specialization: plantation-style export agriculture in

560-464: The United States for Cold War by purging class from consciousness. Muffling exploitative capital in appealing democratic garb, their mythology of consensual democratic capitalism purged egalitarian meaning from democracy. I winced when Ronald Reagan evoked "democracy" against the Evil Empire though clearly meaning capitalism. I grieved when public discourse translated democracy into "freedom" ("liberty" in

595-408: The United States into the world picture for economy and commerce, planting the seed for the United States to increase in wealth and power majority of the time. Sellers argued: By the 1830s and 1840s, trade and specialization among the four port/hinterland regions were creating an integrated sectional market embracing the northeast as a whole. Meanwhile, commercial agriculture spread over the west and

630-401: The United States. As King Cotton became the primary crop in the South, the need for increase in labor arose; thus, the South increased its use of slaves in producing crops. The American North and Western European countries banned slavery in their countries/regions, and attempted to push the South to abolish slavery as well. The slave trade ended, but slavery did not end. As the textile industry in

665-600: The academic mode)—typically meaning freedom to aggrandize yourself without any concern for people who lack the gumption, social advantages, or luck to do the same. Professor John Lauritz Larson has considered these transformations in his book, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good . At the end of its war for independence, the United States comprised thirteen separate provinces on

700-1017: The coast of North America. Nearly all of 3.9 million people made their living through agriculture while a small merchant class traded tobacco, timber, and foodstuffs for tropical goods, useful manufactures, and luxuries in the Atlantic community. By the time of the civil war, eight decades later, the United States sprawled across the North American continent. Nearly 32 million people labored not just on farms, but in shops and factories making iron and steel products, boots and shoes, textiles, paper, packaged foodstuffs, firearms, farm machinery, furniture, tools, and all sorts of housewares. Civil War-era Americans borrowed money from banks; bought insurance against fire, theft, shipwreck, commercial losses, and even premature death; traveled on steamboats and in railway carriages; and produced 2 to 3 billion of goods and services, including exports of 400 million. this dramatic transformation

735-447: The defining event of world history—the evolution from an agrarian to a capitalist society. Sellers observed: While dissolving deeply rooted patterns of behavior and belief for competitive effort, it mobilized collective resources through government to fuel growth in countless ways, not least by providing the essential legal, financial, and transport infrastructures. Establishing capitalist hegemony over economy, politics, and culture,

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770-403: The end of traditionalism and regretting the rise of modernity. The market revolution improved standards of living for most American farmers. For example, a mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815 (which meant that almost no one owned one) cost five in 1848 (and everyone slept better). Finally, retorts Howe, the revolution that really mattered was the "communications revolution": the invention of

805-833: The history department, and Oxford (1992-2002). In 2011 he spent a semester as a visiting professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina . In 1989–1990 Howe was Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford and a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford . In 1992 he became a permanent member of the Oxford history faculty and a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford until his retirement in 2002. Brasenose College, Oxford elected him an Honorary Member of its Senior Common Room. He received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Weber State University in 2014. He currently resides in Sherman Oaks, California , and

840-450: The horse-pulled steel plow to replace the difficult oxen-driven wooden plows that farmers had used for centuries. The steel plow allowed farmers to till soil faster and more cheaply without having to make repairs as often. In the 1830s, Cyrus McCormick invented a mechanical mower-reaper that quintupled the efficiency of wheat farming. Prior to the mower-reaper, wheat farming had been too difficult, so farmers had instead produced corn, which

875-482: The market revolution created ourselves and most of the world we know. Traditional commerce was made obsolete by improvements in transportation and communication. This change prompted the reinstatement of the mercantilist ideas that were thought to have died out. Increased industrialization was a major component of the Market Revolution as a result of the Industrial Revolution . Northern cities started to have

910-565: The market was not an actor (as Sellers makes it) but a resource, an instrumentality, something created by human beings as a means to their ends?" However, Sellers sums up the differences between his and Howe's arguments this way. Howe was proposing that the "Market delivers eager self-improvers from stifling Jacksonian barbarism" whereas he saw that a "Go-getter minority compels everybody else to play its competitive game of speedup and stretch-out or be run over." Howe has praised Larson's approach for rejecting Sellers' "villain": Larson here redeems

945-483: The principles of government activism and the development of large-scale domestic manufacturing. Despite all of the promises that characterized the United States, discrepancies loomed: the survival of slavery, treatment of the Native Americans, the deterioration of some urban areas, and a mania for speculation. The nation was not just growing through the addition of land, but population shifts brought about new states to

980-583: The south, a north built on business and trade, and a frontier west. The regions were interdependent but in time their differences would become more obvious, more important, and increasingly more incompatible. The market revolution also brought about a change in industry and agriculture. Eli Whitney perfected a system of producing muskets with interchangeable parts . Prior to Whitney's invention, most muskets—and all other goods—had been handmade with parts specially designed for each particular musket. The trigger of one musket, for example, could not be used to replace

1015-496: The south; and during the second half of the nineteenth century, the northeast market reached out to incorporate these sections into an integrated national market. By midcentury, capital and technology were converting enough central workshops into mechanized factories to convert the market revolution into a staggeringly productive industrial revolution. Sellers has explained his motivation for this interpretation: As both citizen and historian, I took alarm when consensus historians armed

1050-498: The telegraph, the expansion of the postal system, improvements in printing technology, and the growth of the newspaper, magazine, and book-publishing industries, and the improvements in higher-speed transportation. In his debate with Sellers, Howe asks, "What if people really were benefiting in certain ways from the expansion of the market and its culture? What if they espoused middle-class tastes or evangelical religion or (even) Whig politics for rational and defensible reasons? What if

1085-400: The term "market revolution" from the treatment accorded it by Charles Sellers ... Sellers reified the market revolution, making it an actor in his story—indeed, its villain. Sellers's wicked "Market" ruined the lives of happy subsistence farmers, forcing their sons and daughters to become a proletariat in the service of a repressive bourgeoisie. By contrast, Larson shows how the market revolution

Market Revolution - Misplaced Pages Continue

1120-435: Was later profiled in the nonfiction book Breach of Peace for his role in the event. When it was first published in 1991, Charles Sellers’ book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 represented a major scholarly challenge to what had been, until then, one of the central tenets of U.S. history: that of democracy and capitalism marching together, in lockstep. The book was originally commissioned to be part of

1155-434: Was less profitable. As in the South after the cotton gin, farmers in the West raked in huge profits as they acquired more lands to plant more and more wheat. More important, farmers for the first time began producing more wheat than the West could consume. Rather than let it go to waste, they began to transport crop surpluses to sell in the manufacturing Northeast. The market revolution further exacerbated sectional tensions in

1190-415: Was made by the people themselves, bit by unwitting bit. His own stance toward this process is richly ironic and nuanced; he never fails to point out ambiguities and paradoxes. Charles Grier Sellers Charles Grier Sellers Jr. (September 9, 1923 – September 23, 2021) was an American historian. Sellers was best known for his book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 , which offered

1225-1044: Was president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Historical Society . Howe was born in Ogden, Utah , and graduated from East High School in Denver . He received his Bachelor of Arts at Harvard University in 1959, magna cum laude in American history and literature, and his Ph.D. in history at University of California, Berkeley , in 1966. Howe's connection with Oxford University began when he matriculated at Magdalen College to read modern history in 1960, receiving his M.A. in 1965. Howe has taught at Yale University (1966–73), UCLA (1973-92), where he chaired

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