During the mid 19th century, technological innovation allowed for increased output, demographic expansion and access to global factor markets for labor, goods and capital.
His book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 portrayed it as a highly negative development that marked the triumph of capitalism over democracy.
[1] He argued that this was one of the most significant transformations of America within the first half of the nineteenth century—indeed, 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.
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.
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.
By the 1820s Americans recognized a rough regional specialization: plantation-style export agriculture in the south, a north built on business and trade, and a frontier west.
[6]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 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.
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.
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 the end of traditionalism and regretting the rise of modernity.
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.
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.