about the Market Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution and the Transportation

and the Communication Revolutions of the early 19th century

had a major impact on American society,

both in the short term and in the long term.

In this video, I want to talk about three major effects

of the Market Revolution, and those were changes

in labor, entry into a national

and international market system

and the Second Great Awakening.

All right, so what effect

did the Market Revolution have on labor?

Well, we've already talked about this a little bit

in the earlier videos, but here is a view

of a textile factory floor.

Now this is from a slightly later period,

but I think it gives you a good sense of what it was like

to work in a textile factory.

With the Market Revolution really comes the emergence

of factory labor in the United States.

And there are a couple of ways that, that's important.

One is that people start working for wages.

It's a move away from subsistence farming

and a barter economy, which also means that

people aren't necessarily in charge of themselves anymore.

And there's a lot that goes along with that,

which means that people stop being their own bosses.

Instead, they report to other bosses.

And that can be problematic because

it means that you have a lot less control

over your daily life.

So imagine that you're a farmer and you're really sick.

Oh well, you know maybe you don't plant some seed that day

and you do it the next day.

Imagine that you work at a textile mill

and you get really sick, you don't report to work

and you get fired.

So people are no longer able to set the pace

of their own lives by and large.

And with things like interchangeable parts, for example,

fewer and fewer artisans, so masters of a craft,

are making goods from start to finish.

So it used to be perhaps you would be a master shoemaker,

a master cobbler, and you would make every part of that shoe

from tanning the leather to nailing in the sole.

The system of interchangeable parts,

which will later become even more codified

as the assembly-line system,

means that most people are only doing

one part of a task.

So instead of doing all of making a shoe and saying

at the end of it, "I made this shoe,

"I am a master maker of shoes," now your entire job

might just be to hammer in one nail

and then hand off the shoe to the next person.

So there's never anything that you can point to

and say, "I made that."

So a lot of people say that this is a period

when people stop being able to take pride in their own work

or at least not as much pride.

But what's even more important about this process

of interchangeable parts, assembly-line labor,

is that it leads to an overall, what they call, deskilling.

So removing the skill from labor.

And what's important about that is that

if you've broken down a task into enough small parts

that you've got people literally hammering in

the same nail on a different shoe 12 hours a day,

then you don't necessarily need highly trained artisans

to do that.

And what happens if you are not highly trained,

we'll call this unskilled labor, and you decide you want to

strike for higher pay?

Well, your boss doesn't need to train anyone

to hammer in that nail so you'll just get fired.

So it makes the labor force in general

a little bit more precarious because you don't need

an exceptional skill to have a factory job,

but you are easily replaced.

All right, let's talk about entry into a market system.

Now what do I mean by this?

In this time period, the United States develops

what's called a market economy.

And that's different from what most people had been doing

up until that point because people in the United States

had mainly shipped raw materials

over to Europe, England particularly,

to be processed and made into finished goods.

And this is similar to the system of mercantilism

that you might be familiar with from the colonial era.

Well, the war of 1812 and some of the conflict

leading up to it, led the United States to embargo England,

which was a manufacturing center.

So people couldn't send their raw materials there.

They responded by investing in their own factories.

So the war of 1812 is actually a pretty important moment

for the development of domestic industrialization at home.

And so now, instead of this kind of import/export

or barter economy, people are making deals

with other investors all over the United States,

all over the world.

So this gives people an opportunity to invest

and to speculate.

And that means that as they're a part

of an international market of investment speculation,

they're prone to the kinds of booms and busts

that characterize capitalism, right?

Now we often think of the Great Depression

as having been the first major American depression.

But really, it was the largest and most recent

up until that point, because after the war of 1812,

the United States kinda goes through approximately

a 20-year cycle of boom and bust.

So boom is when things are getting better,

things are looking up, the economy is going really well,

and then a bubble of some kind bursts.

And in 1819, they had the very first of these bubbles burst,

it's called the Panic of 1819 in land speculation.

And this is the first time that the United States

had actually experienced any kind of economic depression.

So imagine how frightening that would have been to them.

One of the hardest things about market-based capitalism

is that individuals don't really have control

over the larger market.

It's not one person that made the Great Depression happen.

It was an overall loss in consumer confidence

or perhaps overproduction, right?

If too many people are supplying the same commodity,

the price is dropping through the laws of supply and demand.

So now, the laws of supply and demand and the pressures

of an international market are really changing

the nature of American commerce because

they're enmeshed in that market.

And that has all kinds of political and social ramifications

for the United States.

Understanding the volatility of belonging

to an international market

kind of helps explain why Andrew Jackson

was so obsessed with the National Bank

at this time period, right?

Because it represents this confusing matrix

of international supply and demand

and people getting credit or not getting credit.

And being part of this international market

is something that's going to have a major effect

on the American South, and particularly

the enslaved population that lives in the American South

because they're going to be supplying cotton

to the world's textile mills.

And those are textile mills in New England

and textile mills in England.

And as the world demands cotton for processing,

the South is going to supply that cotton,

which is picked by enslaved individuals.

And one of the reasons that the Confederacy believes

that it can succeed as an independent nation

is because they're supplying cotton to England.

And when England managed to find its own supply of cotton

from Egypt and India, the economic chances

of the Confederacy were sunk.

And the last thing that I think is related to this

Market Revolution is the Second Great Awakening.

Now I don't wanna go into too much detail about this

because of a whole separate series of videos

about the Second Great Awakening,

but this Second Great Awakening was kind of an explosion

of religious fervor, which was happening

at almost exactly the same time as the Market Revolution.

And many American historians actually think

that it's these confusing and confounding

and anxious forces that lead a lot of people

to take up religion.

Because as the world is changing around them,

as people now have to relate in different ways

to their neighbors as bosses and employees

rather than bartering partners,

and as they're swept up in international markets

that are outside their control,

people look for new explanations

and comfort in an increasingly

confusing world.

So that's one explanation for the Second Great Awakening.

So I started out this series of videos by saying that

some historians have argued that the Market Revolution

was actually more revolutionary

than the American Revolution.

Now that's a difficult question to answer

because we're talking about a revolution in politics

as opposed to kind of a revolution of economics.

But I will say that though the American Revolution

dissolved the political bonds between the United States

and Great Britain, its social and economic impact

were relatively limited.

Most people kind of ended up in the same place

socially after the American Revolution

as they were before it.

But the Market Revolution changes an awful lot

in American society in terms of

how they participate internationally

and how people organize their daily lives.

So I think there is a strong argument to be made

that this revolution of economics, technology,

even religion, is considerably farther reaching

than the American Revolution.