Material culture studies is a rapidly expanding field of historical analysis which takes physical evidence as its point of inquiry, in order to ask questions about what objects meant to the individuals that used them, and moreover what agency objects might have exercised in shaping behaviors and consciousness. During my time at the LMU in Munich, I was fortunate enough to take a graduate introductory course into this field. Below is my review of one of the most fascinating texts from the course: Tim Breen's article "Baubles of Britain", which examines the links between the developing American national consciousness and the consumer revolution of the 18th Century through the prism of Material Culture studies. You can read Breen's article at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/651021
REVIEWED WORK: “Baubles
of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century by
T. H. Breen
REVIEW BY: Holly Day
“Baubles
of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century by
T. H. Breen, Past & Present, No.
119 (May, 1988), pp.73-104
Something extraordinary happened to cultural analysis
in the 1980s. Objects began to be considered as having historical importance; the study of material culture started to emerge as an academic field. Writing in 1988, Breen was one
of the academics who perceived this shift and used it to provide an insightful
and original take on one of the causal factors of the American Revolution.
However, now that material culture studies has developed as a field, Breen’s approach here feels less satisfactory, particularly as he does not attach to material objects
the degree of agency that many material culture historians would today.[1]
Instead, the material world he is dealing with is one filled with “symbolic
functions”, and the historical processes he describes are ones of “symbolic
redefinitions”.
The main objective of his article is to explain the
growth of an American national consciousness - which proved essential for
American independence - through the use of material culture analysis. To set
the scene, Breen initially describes how unlikely American independence seemed
considering the factors working against American unity: a large population
spread over an ‘immense territory’, in which people had little in common to each
other, and had differing customs, manners, and religion, and even different
constitutions throughout the colonies. This opening anticipates an answer as to
what “means [American’s had found] to communicate effectively with each other,
to develop a shared sense of political purpose, to transcend what at
mid-century had appeared insurmountable cultural and geographic divisions’.
Breen dismisses what he terms the “economic explanations” or explanations from
“intellectual historians” as reductive or too ideologically grounded. Here, he
draws a distinction separating the ‘materialists from the idealists’;
separating his interpretive scheme from the ideologically grounded schemes he
has just dismissed. He therefore seeks to approach the question from a different
angle. He will resolve the issues of the other schemes by ‘casting the
historical debate in different terms’, by which he means that he will focus on
the symbolic values of material
objects instead of just ideas of individuals detached from the material world
in which they subsisted.
A question arises at this point – why must we completely recast the historical debate?
Why is there no middle ground for, say, material culture and economic history?
Breen critiques the economic and intellectual arguments, but only in a way
which weakens their primacy, not that outright dismisses their relevance. In
the material culture approach taken by Breen, there seems no reason why there
cannot be room for overlap. However he discusses these alternative approaches
no further.
He continues by modestly stating that his aim is to
‘explore the relation between the growth of national consciousness and the
American rejection of the “baubles of Britain”’ – a more limited aim than his
opening paragraphs would indicate. Yet as we get into the main body of the
article, it becomes clear that his central thesis does provide an answer the initial question of “what means united
the disparate Americans?” His answer: a ‘shared language of consumption’. The consumer
revolution of the eighteenth century provided a means for Americans to
communicate their status to one another through the use of commodities. This
allowed Americans to situate themselves within an experiential framework that
was common to all – their experience as consumer.
However, the large bulk of these sought-after consumer goods were British goods, and so American consumers
became dependent on British imports. As these objects became politicised by
taxation laws passed by Parliament, the consumption of these objects went
through a process of symbolic redefinition which transformed them from ‘private
consumer acts into public political statements.’ They became associated with
political and moral rhetoric such as ‘liberty’ ‘virtue’ and constitutional
rights. This symbolic redefinition forced ordinary individuals to decide where
they stood in political debates about American independence – as to continue to
participate in a British-driven consumer culture could have awkward
implications about your commitment to American liberty. The non-consumption
movement (the boycotting of British manufacturers) was a means of unifying
Americans who might differ in political ideologies and material realities, but
who had their “shared language of consumption” in common. This common
experiential framework helped Americans to see themselves as part of an
imagined community, and from this they could imagine themselves as an
independence nation. The irony is clear in Breen’s account: the British created
the consumer market in America which provided a common experience to ordinary
Americans, and by taxing these goods provided Americans with a shared language
by which they could unite, and through this unity demand independence.
Thus goes the main thrust of Breen’s argument. At
its best, this is a sophisticated article which utilises material culture to
take a fresh approach to a well-documented event – the American Revolution. At
its worst however, it is muddled, lacking in evidence, and still finds itself
caught up in the ideological analysis that it tries separate itself from. In
part, its weaknesses result from how early material culture studies was as a distinct
field when this article was written. I suspect that in his 2004 book “The
Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence”
may provide a clearer account of the relationship between the consumer
revolution and the American Revolution as his argument is given more space to
develop. Moreover, it is clear that this
is a historian writing. Tim Breen is
a historian currently working at Northwestern University and the University of
Vermont and who specialises in the American Revolution. Therefore, his
interpretative scheme uses material culture in a different way to many
specialists in the field itself.
Breen situates material culture in the larger narrative
of the American independence movement, an approach that Cary Carson has
praised.[2] One
particularly successful aspect of Breen’s interpretative scheme is its
democratic approach. By looking at the world of everyday objects, Breen shows
that ordinary townsfolk, women, young people, and poor people – groups often
ignored in historical narratives – were as important to achieving independence
as key political players. Nor does he allow his interpretation to silence the
people who actually participated in the process he is describing; rather he
allows the words of these people from various written accounts to guide his
understanding. He also refers to legal documents, newspapers, letters, and
advertisements. In some cases, these suffice to provide insight into the way
ordinary Americans understood the material world and its intersection with
political discourse, but in other cases these merely provide illustrative
examples which are not sufficient as evidence for his thesis. It would be
useful for him to perhaps indicate how common the views or associations given
in his examples were in all the accounts he examined, or how easily they can be
generalised, rather than just leaving their relevance as implicit.
However, the main issue that material culture
writers might take with Breen’s article is his approach to material culture
itself. He considers objects and the material world in terms of ‘a symbolic
universe of commonplace “things”. Whilst he does not place the dominant
ideology as the main agent of change in his historical narrative, he still
gives primacy to ideas, albeit focusing on how these ideas became part of subject-object
relations. An author such as Bill Brown might outright dismiss this approach as
prioritising subjects over objects.[3] In
other words, Breen does not really consider
the objects themselves to have historical agency, instead it is the ideas
associated with objects and their symbolic value to the subjects which are
presented as having historical significance. Other authors such as Richard
Grassby also criticize ‘the giddy world of symbolic interpretation’ in which
‘goods have no practical use’.[4]
Whilst Breen does occasionally consider the material realities of the objects
he is talking about – a notable example being his fantastic description of the
various ways people mistakenly used tea – for the most part he is not
interested in the objects. The most frequent type of evidence he uses is written
sources, whilst analyses of the objects themselves are absent.
It would be anachronistic to judge Breen’s approach
too harshly because it differs from the (diverse) approach taken by some more
recent material culture historians. On its own terms, Breen’s approach is more
successful. He achieves his aim of exploring the relation between the growth of
national consciousness and the American rejection of the “baubles of Britain”.
He even provides an alternative explanation as to how Americans were able to
unite, although his thesis on its own cannot fully account for this process.
Yet within the context of material culture scholarship we can see potential
points for improvement – perhaps by examining the objects themselves he could
analyse to a greater depth why these
“baubles of Britain” had such an appeal to Americans in the first place? And
whilst Breen takes a relatively democratic approach, he completely ignores the
potential role of slaves or Native Americans in the consumer revolution and the
non-consumption movement.[5] Therefore,
one can only welcome the expansion of his argument in his 2004 book, which
gives him room to provide a more nuanced and evidence-based contribution to
material culture studies.
[1] Dan
Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, ‘Introduction: Material Culture Studies: a
Reactionary View’ in The Oxford Handbook
of Material Culture Studies (Oxford, 2012), p. 1-2.
[2]
Cary Carson, ‘The Scholarship that Nobody Knows’, in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Eds. Ann Smart Martin,
and J. Ritchie Garrison) (Knoxville, 1997).
[3]
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical
Inquiry , Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1-22.
[4]
Richard Grassby, ‘Material Culture and Cultural History’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Spring,
2005), p. 501.
[5] David
Waldstreicher, ‘Review of: The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics
Shaped American Independence by T. H. Breen’, The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (March, 2005), p.
1417.
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