Market Revolution

Abstract

The term market revolution describes a succession of economic and technological changes that transformed U.S. society between 1825 and 1860. The construction of roads, canals, and railroads; the opening of the West to settlement; the expansion of postal delivery routes; and the introduction of the telegraph drew previously disparate communities closer together and helped to create a national market of commodities, goods, labor, and services. This transformation fundamentally altered American notions of manhood, causing a shift from the eighteenth-century ideal of the community-oriented patriarch and provider to the more modern ideal of the market-oriented breadwinner and “self-made man.”