"Millions of Luxurious Citizens": Consumption and Citizenship in the Urban Northeast, 1800-1865

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Degree type
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Graduate group
History
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consumption
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
citizenship
market
New York
tariff
Cultural History
Economic History
Political Economy
United States History
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Cohen, Joanna
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Abstract

In the century following the American Revolution, culturally powerful middle-class citizens in the northeast slowly abandoned a vision of civic non-consumption that rested on the strength of imperial boycotts and instead converted their consumption of luxury goods and products into a civic act. This dissertation reveals how these citizens challenged the limitations that a republican vision of political economy placed on consumers in the early republic. Through discussions over taxation, tariff and market regulation, middle-class men and women struggled to define their civic rights and obligations as consumers in a capitalist democracy. As they began to imagine their civic identity more in terms of their capacity as consumers rather than producers, well-off citizens created a new vision of economic citizenship that acknowledged the consumer as a rights-bearing individual. By the end of the Civil War, middle-class Americans in the North had transformed the civic dimensions of consumption. By disconnecting consumption from a republican political economy, middle-class citizens made consumption part of a new politics of representation, freeing themselves from older civic restraints. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for the consumer culture that would escalate rapidly in the twentieth century. Using an analytical framework that combines cultural history with the study of political economy, Millions of Luxurious Citizens asks how it was that nineteenth century middle-class producers, retailers and consumers imagined the demands of the nation's economy and translated those ideas into a vision of citizenship that made shopping in America both a right and an obligation.

Advisor
Stephanie McCurry
Date of degree
2009-01-01
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Related publications based on this dissertation: Luxurious Citizens: Consumption and Civic Belonging in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). “Promoting Pleasure as Political Economy: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1800 to 1850.” http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/wp.html The Winterthur Portfolio(link is external), (forthcoming)
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