According to EMILY EAKIN, T. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence claims that

Even before America was a nation, Mr. Breen insists, it was a society of consumers.

Deceptively simple, his argument goes like this: two and a half million strong and scattered along 1,800 miles of coastline, the colonists had little in common besides a weakness for what Samuel Adams derisively termed "the Baubles of Britain." When Britain imposed stiff taxes on this appetite for stuff — without granting any political representation — Americans responded with an ingenious invention with instant and widespread appeal: the consumer boycott. By the time the First Continental Congress was convened in September 1774, transforming mass consumer mobilization into a successful political rebellion was a relatively straightforward task...

Or, as he put it on the telephone, "the American revolution has a bourgeois foundation, but it's no less radical for that."