Market Revolution and its influence to a Multicultural America. Ronald Takaki retells the American history from the bottom up, through the lives of many minorities. The stories of many ethnical groups who helped create America’s mighty economy and rich culture, in his book, A Different Mirror. All these indigenous people were a part of what America is today, a more multicultural country. These peoples were looking for a better life, and they helped create a concrete backbone for America’s economic structure.
This led to the rise ‘market revolution’, which changed America culturally. The revolution was good for America, but for the immigrants, it was abysmal. They were not viewed as Americans, despite their efforts to make America what it is today. We will see as the Irish were deprived of their land, coming to the land of the free in search for a better life, how they later marginalize the Mexicans. The Market revolution opened the way to making America more multicultural but not all cultures were equal.
The Market Revolution opened the way of making an ever more multicultural America. The demand for labor led to the massive influx of laborers from Ireland, the incorporation of Mexicans with the annexation of the Southwest territories, and then the migrations of the Chinese to America. As the economy grew, so did the movement of people resulting in a process of globalization which was driven by a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural, political, and biological factors.
Economically it was affirmative, in that the country benefited a great deal financially as the economy was booming with the cotton kingdom. Cotton production ushered America into “the take-off years that transformed America into a highly complex industrial economy” (72). On the other hand, as it was constructive economically, politically it was not so good. The revolution created a paradoxical issue that all people are equal but not equal to be an American citizen.
The Founding Fathers had declared the “self-evident truth that all men are created equal but in 1787, they wrote into the Constitution a provision that implicitly legalized slavery: the number of representatives each state would send to Congress would be determined by the number of ‘free persons’ and ‘three fifths of all other persons’ , the code phrase for slaves” (72). Politically, all men were equal, in principle, the indigenous people, who not because they were indentured servants. They were not equivalent to an American born citizen, and had no inalienable rights. The system was for them when American was enefiting, yet it was against them when it came to equality. America was becoming a nation peopled by the world. Graphically the market revolution could be seen as individuals working in the textile mills of New England, Irish immigrant women manufactured fabric made from cotton grown on former Indian lands and picked by enslaved African Americans. Meanwhile, Irish immigrant men labored in New England shoe factories, making shoes from hides shipped by Mexican workers in California. Chinese railroad workers laid the transcontinental tracks that closed the frontier and changed forever the lives of the Indians in the west.
The Irish and Mexicans were treated below average. These peoples fled their land for a better life. The Irish for instance were made to suffer in their own country. They were viewed as people living outside of ‘civilization’. All their production both commercial and agricultural was under the British. They involuntary survived on potatoes and buttermilk. In the late eighteenth century, the English landlords decided to make their estates more profitable; therefore, they initiated a campaign to transform Ireland’s economy into a ‘cattle civilization’(130).
By enclosing their estates and evicting peasant families, landlords shifted from tillage agriculture to ranching. The English created a commercial economy which in hiked up the prices. “Progress for the landlords meant pauperization”(133), for the Irish peasants. With enclosures, fencing, and private property laws, the peasants were lead to marginal lands which were worthless. It seemed like it was manifest destiny for the British towards the Ireland natives. The Irish moved to America where there was “room for all-employment for all, and success for many” (134).
Unfortunately, in America, the Irish found themselves stereotyped as ignorant and inferior, and forced to occupy the bottom rungs of employment. Despite being discriminated against, they entered politics and business and working as factory girls and railroad builders, they considered themselves American citizens. As an immigrant stated, “When we left Ireland, we left our old world behind, we are all American citizens and proud of it”(154). In the face of discrimination, they still felt they were part of the country they were building.
They had become part of it. The Market Revolution also stimulated the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom into Mexico, a self-governing nation bordering the United States to the south west. Americans moved into the Mexican lands, and the latter was welcoming at first. Progressively, clashes arose. Language barriers were tough as these two different frequents did not understand each other.. Because the Americans wanted the locals’ land, they took advantage of title deeds which got them the lands they wanted fairly easy.
Mexico was sparsely populated, thus pushing the locals further south into Mexico. Agrarian and agricultural differences as well as religious ones eventually led to incongruities between the two nations. Mexicans were deprived of their land as America was progressing. The annexation of what was Mexican land; lead to what is now Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico. Their conflicts built up and let to the Mexican-American war in the 1840’s. Like the Irish, the Mexicans lost their land. A litigious America, the Mexicans were marginalized.
During the Mexican American War, many Irish immigrants served in the United States Armed Forces. Poignantly, the Irish had been marginalized from their homeland by British imperialism, and here in America, they became part of the conquest of Mexico. Market revolution opened the way to making America more multicultural nation, as Takaki emphasizes in his novel, but it was an unequal nation. Not everybody was one and the same. All the immigrants were exploited and deprived of their hard work and labor, yet America’s political system failed to recognize them as fellow Americans.
