givings about "luxury." Since Americans exported agricultural staples and other raw materials while importing finished goods, the best way to assure a favorable balance of trade, it appeared, was to discourage expensive tastes. This way of thinking became official policy in the nonimportation agreements of the revolutionary war and later in Jefferson's embargo—experiments in which Americans called on the familiar critique of luxury to support the patriotic cause. When Spartan self-denial was tied to the defense of American liberties in the most direct and compelling fashion, political experience thus joined mercantilist doctrine in retarding the development of a capitalist ideology in which the multiplication of wants became something to be celebrated, not deplored, as the foundation of progress and general prosperity. At the same time, of course, these recurring boycotts of foreign trade, especially the embargo, had the unforeseen effect of encouraging the growth of domestic manufactures by cutting off the supply of foreign goods.

The capitalist economy developed more rapidly than capitalist ideology, however. Well into the nineteenth century, Americans remained deeply suspicious of credit, corporations, and wage labor. Limited-liability corporations were not "restrained by those prudential considerations which prevent individuals from embarking their capital rashly," a Jacksonian Democrat explained, "in the desperate hope of gain." Another Jacksonian, identifying himself as an "anti-corporationist in the broadest sense of the term," urged a law holding stockholders individually accountable for their debts, his object being "to prevent the establishment of the same kind of society here which had been described as existing in other countries." "What primogeniture did on the other side of the Atlantic," he feared, "corporations would do here." The expansion of credit, according to this line of argument, made it possible for men and women to live beyond their means—which for enthusiastic exponents of commercial progress was precisely the point. For old-fashioned liberals, the expansion of credit encouraged envy and emulation, the dictatorship of fashion, and a contempt for honest labor.

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