Overview

A definitive history of consumer activism, Buying Power traces the lineage of this political tradition back to our nation’s founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon. Taking the Boston Tea Party as his starting point, Lawrence Glickman argues that the rejection of British imports by revolutionary patriots inaugurated a continuous series of consumer boycotts, campaigns for safe and ethical consumption, and efforts to make goods more broadly accessible. He explores abolitionist-led efforts to eschew slave-made goods, African American consumer campaigns against Jim Crow, a 1930s refusal of silk from fascist Japan, and emerging contemporary movements like slow food. Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, Glickman illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. He also sheds new light on activists’ relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.

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9780226298658

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"""In this major, learned, and ambitious book, Lawrence Glickman weaves together social, cultural, and intellectual history to show how consumer activism has, since the mid-eighteenth century, waxed and waned but never disappeared. Glickman has an incomparable grasp of the entire sweep of the history of consumer society, and Buying Power is the most influential, wide-ranging, nuanced, provocative, original, and commanding book on the subject in recent memory. It will shape discussions of American political and social history for years to come."" - Daniel Horowitz, author of The Anxieties of Affluence"""

In this major, learned, and ambitious book, Lawrence Glickman weaves together social, cultural, and intellectual history to show how consumer activism has, since the mid-eighteenth century, waxed and waned but never disappeared. Glickman has an incomparable grasp of the entire sweep of the history of consumer society, and Buying Power is the most influential, wide-ranging, nuanced, provocative, original, and commanding book on the subject in recent memory. It will shape discussions of American political and social history for years to come. - Daniel Horowitz, author of The Anxieties of Affluence

Author Information

Lawrence B. Glickman is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society.

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