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How Choice Fueled Panic: Philadelphians, Consumption, and the Panic of 1837

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Sean Patrick Adams
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Extract

This essay examines the role of working-class consumers in public debates over the public regulation of food and fuel markets in Philadelphia in the years leading up to the Panic of 1837. As price spikes in these necessities inflamed the cries for state authorities to insure fair prices for these goods and to put an end to the growing scale and scope of free market capitalism, these pleas went unfulfilled. Instead, urban residents saw many of the longstanding measures designed to protect less affluent Americans from devastating price swings—regulated marketplaces for meat, traditional fuel markets, and the bread assize, for example—had eroded as policymakers offered a vision of a free market economy that pushed aside longstanding assumptions about the role of public officials in the marketplace itself.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 761 - 789
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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