Reviews in American History

About halfway through his book Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America, Cary Carson claims that the French furnishing known as a "buffet" was "almost as foreign as its name was unpronounceable" when it appeared in British America in the early eighteenth century. "Among southern inventory takers," Carson notes, "it often came out 'Boofott' or 'Beaufett' or (was it?) 'Bow-Fatt.' Never mind," he concludes. "Owning one was all that counted" (p. 143).

It is hard to believe that Carson first made this witty point almost twenty-five years ago. Face Value is largely a reprint of an epic (and classic) 215-page article published in a 1994 anthology on the eighteenth century "consumer revolution." That the new book's argument is not at all stale is a testament both to Carson's accessible, engaging prose, and to the enduring centrality of two debates over the meaning of consumption among scholars of early American material culture. In fact, the age of Carson's text does nothing to inhibit its ability to converse with two newer works: Zara Anishanslin's Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, and Jennifer Van Horn's The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century America. Despite some key differences between them, these books work together to take old debates [End Page 3] in such new directions that we might well wonder if it is time to shed the pretensions of the old debates altogether.

The first of the old debates centers on "Anglicization," or the degree to which Britain's American colonists strove to re-create the mother country in the New World. The term first appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, when historians John Murrin and Jack Greene, along with archaeologist James Deetz, used it to describe a "transformation" of colonial law and culture between 1690 and 1750. These scholars claimed that colonists lived more like Englishmen only after an initial period marked by greater difference, due to the colonists' overwhelming environmental conditions and limited economic wherewithal. The thesis was subsequently deployed in countless studies, perhaps nowhere as prominently as in the series of articles that led to T.H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004), which argued that the American Revolution was in part a response from colonists who felt alienated by imperial regulation after they had consumed their way toward more Anglicized lives.¹

Early Americanists who study material culture have been debating Anglicization since its conception, with some questioning it by analyzing patterns in form and ornament that indicate the persistence of regionalism and the willful integration of vernacular local traits with "high-style" English and European elements. Such arguments in favor of creolization over Anglicization translated neatly into the multiple disciplines from which material culture scholars hailed. For example, a generation of art historians have used these patterns to argue that colonial objects reflected colonists' choice not to completely replicate cosmopolitan aesthetics rather than feeble attempts to perfectly copy them, as older art historical scholarship had posited.²

Carson, Anishanslin, and Van Horn issue a fresh set of critiques of Anglicization. Carson's central argument is that the explosion of consumption was not initially driven by technologies of production churning out more and cheaper goods but by a demand which predated and precipitated those technologies. Revealing his roots as an early modernist, Carson sees demand as a result of increasing geographic mobility related to the decline of feudalism...