Although the Great Awakening, Enlightenment, and rise of the Whig ideology created distance between the colonies and Britain, mercantilist policies that restricted foreign trade to the colonies brought the two nations closer. In his review of T.H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution, John Craig Hammond contends, “The expansion of the consumer market immolated the importance of colonial consumers in the imperial economy. The colonies imported…roughly one quarter of Britain’s exports. No longer rustic provincials on the margins of the empire, the colonies were a dynamic part of an ever-expanding British economy.”(Hammond 42) The colonists constantly wished to influence the English economy; mercantilism granted that wish. By making the colonists…show more content… The sizeable amount of imports to the colonies gave them a large influence on the British market, creating a balance of uncorrupted sales that gave the colonists a sense of self-worth and meaning.Because of their great influence on the British economy, the colonists had a hard time arguing against the motherland, prompting them to grow closer. Correspondingly, Taylor later claims “[Breen] describes stores as ‘sites of imagination’ and shopping as ‘a moment of excitement and entertainment, a gathering of humble neighbors in their capacity as consumers of British manufactured goods… By introducing vibrant colors into poorly illuminated rooms of colonial houses… colonial Dorothys attained their Land of Oz in eighteenth-century consumption.”(Taylor 48) As the colonists grew fond of the new wave of commercial products, they associated Britain as the source and supplier of their