Luxurious Citizens
eBook - PDF

Luxurious Citizens

The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America

  1. 296 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Luxurious Citizens

The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America

About this book

After the Revolution, Americans abandoned the political economy of self-denial and sacrifice that had secured their independence. In its place, they created one that empowered the modern citizen-consumer. This profound transformation was the uncoordinated and self-serving work of merchants, manufacturers, advertisers, auctioneers, politicians, and consumers themselves, who collectively created the nation's modern consumer economy: one that encouraged individuals to indulge their desires for the sake of the public good and cast the freedom to consume as a triumph of democracy. In Luxurious Citizens, Joanna Cohen traces the remarkable ways in which Americans tied consumer desire to the national interest between the end of the Revolution and the Civil War.Illuminating the links between political culture, private wants, and imagined economies, Cohen offers a new understanding of the relationship between citizens and the nation-state in nineteenth-century America. By charting the contest over economic rights and obligations in the United States, Luxurious Citizens argues that while many less powerful Americans helped to create the citizen-consumer it was during the Civil War that the Union government made use of this figure, by placing the responsibility for the nation's economic strength and stability on the shoulders of the people. Union victory thus enshrined a new civic duty in American life, one founded on the freedom to buy as you pleased. Reinterpreting the history of the tariff, slavery, and the coming of the Civil War through an examination of everyday acts of consumption and commerce, Cohen reveals the important ways in which nineteenth-century Americans transformed their individual desires for goods into an index of civic worth and fixed unbridled consumption at the heart of modern America's political economy.

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Yes, you can access Luxurious Citizens by Joanna Cohen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Economic History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Dilemmas 
of 
Abundance 
21
Figure 
1. 
Portrait 
of 
Benjamin 
Franklin
, 
David 
Martin, 
1767, 
oil 
on 
canvas, 
58¾ 
× 
50⅜ 
in. 
Courtesy 
of 
the 
Pennsylvania 
Academy 
of 
the 
Fine 
Arts, 
Philadelphia. 
Gift 
of 
Maria 
McKean 
Allen 
and 
Phebe 
Warren 
Downes 
through 
the 
bequest 
of 
their 
mother, 
Elizabeth 
Wharton 
McKean.
Beyond 
the 
problems 
such 
goods 
posed 
to 
questions 
of 
both 
interna-
tional 
economic 
independence 
and 
national 
economic 
activity, 
the 
pursuit 
and 
possession 
of 
luxury 
goods 
also 
challenged 
the 
very 
formation 
of 
a 
repub-
lican 
political 
economy. 
e 
demands 
of 
republican 
citizenship, 
argued 
New 
England 
men 
such 
as 
Samuel 
Adams 
and 
Benjamin 
Austin, 
asked 
American 
men 
to 
cultivate 
a 
disinterested 
and 
selfless 
civic 
identity 
in 
order 
to 
best 
serve 
the 
nation.
27
Yet 
luxury 
seemed 
to 
seep 
into 
every 
corner 
of 
society, 

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Luxurious Citizens
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Introduction. Imagining the Citizen-Consumer
  8. Chapter 1. Dilemmas of Abundance
  9. Chapter 2. The Marketplace of Retribution
  10. Chapter 3. The Perils of the Public Auction
  11. Chapter 4. Of Tariffs and Taste
  12. Chapter 5. “They Now Advertise Liberally”
  13. Chapter 6. Consumers at War
  14. Epilogue. The Citizen-Consumer and the State of the Nation
  15. Notes
  16. Index
  17. Acknowledgments