The Boycott Narrative
The word boycott (with slight modifications reflecting language idiosyncrasies)
entered most of the world’s major languages starting in 1880. Charles C. Boycott
has found eternal fame not because he invented the boycott but because he was
its most celebrated victim. Boycott was the land manager for an absentee
landlord in Ireland. Responding to a bad crop in 1880, he offered to cut by 10%
the rents to be paid by tenant landlords, but the tenants demanded a 25% cut. He
resisted. An Irish organization of land tenants then appealed to the broader
community for support against Boycott. In October 1880, Boycott described his
travails in a letter to the editor of the Times of London:
On the 22d of September a process-server, escorted by a police force of 17
men, retreated on my house for protection, followed by a howling mob of
people, who yelled and hooted at the members of my family. On the ensuing
day, September 23, the people collected in crowds upon my farm, and some
hundred or so came up to my house and ordered off, under threats of ulterior
consequences, all my farm labourers, workmen, and stablemen, commanding
them never to work for me again.… The shopkeepers have been warned to
stop all supplies to my house.… I can get no workmen to do anything, and my
ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up
everything and leave the country.1
This is a vivid story, but why did it go viral worldwide? First, it was
controversial. On one side, the action against Boycott seemed to offend human
sensibilities, but on the other side, it addressed the prominent questions of rising
inequality and the concentration of wealth and power. It was not the first time
such actions had been taken. But this time the idea developed that asking for
moral support in the form of a boycott from the general community might be a
powerful tool. Indeed, the boycott seemed to be a new and superior tactic for
labor because it involved the entire community, which did not directly benefit
from the boycott. Thus it seemed to be proof that the action was moral, not self-
interested. The idea was highly contagious, and it spread far and wide.
Boycott would eventually become the centerpiece of its own economic
narrative. Like some other narratives, it centers on an emotional response—in
this case, anger against businesspeople. The boycott narrative brings with it a

sense of conspiracy also generated by anger. As we will see in this chapter, the
boycott narrative and others in its constellation tend to recur when there is a
broad-based undercurrent of social opprobrium, and they are economically
important because they affect people’s willingness to spend and willingness to
compromise.

The Boycott Narrative Goes Viral
In The Boycott in American Trade Unions (1916), labor historian Leo Wolman
wrote:
Almost without warning the boycott suddenly emerged in 1880 to become for
the next ten or fifteen years the most effective weapon of unionism. There
was no object so mean and no person so exalted as to escape its power.2
By the middle of the depression of the 1890s, the narrative began to change,
and the public was becoming fed up with a constant succession of boycotts. The
moral authority of boycotts disappears when most people begin to express
suspicion and annoyance with them. As Wolman notes:
The influence of the American Federation of Labor has been exerted in
inducing in its members a greater conservatism in the employment of the
boycott. Practically the great majority of its legislative acts from 1893 to 1908
have been designed to control the too frequent use of the boycott. At the
convention of 1894 the executive council remarked “the impracticability of
indorsement of too many applications of this sort. There is too much diffusion
of effort which fails to accomplish the best results.” Thereafter, every few
years saw the adoption of new rules restricting the endorsement of boycotts.3
But boycotts did not go away forever, and they have recurred periodically
throughout modern economic history. In each case, the boycott lasts only as long
as the narrative behind it remains strong. When the underlying narrative
weakens, the boycott eventually falls apart.