What is the author's tone in the nonfiction book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846?

The tone of the market revolution mixes the tones of resignation and hope. Marxian historiography holds that each stage of history is determined by the conditions of the previous one through a form of economic determinism. Consequently, Sellers approaches the text with a sense that each moment in history is simply a manifestation of a broad social and economic trend that will inexorably lead to the next. To some extent then, the tone manifests an air of resignation to the conflicts that occur in American society. Feudalism simply must die in the face of the extraordinary productive power of liberal capitalism. And while slave relations are replaced with wage relations, the wage relations are in some ways more pernicious because they make the true slavery of the industrial system. Further, in many pre-capitalist societies people could control the means of production and were not alienated from their labor and from one another. An air of sadness hangs across the text as a result.