What is a Boycott?
A boycott is a coordinated effort to avoid purchasing goods and services from a particular company or person. Boycotts are designed to exert pressure on companies, forcing them to reform their ways in a way which satisfies the people involved in the boycott. The labor and civil rights movements have both used boycotts extensively as political tools, perhaps most famously in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 in the American South. The term “boycott” references an actual person, Captain Charles Boycott, an Englishman who was responsible for managing land in Ireland in the 1800s. When his tenants pressured him to lower their rents, he refused to do so, and evicted them. In response, the tenants organized, denying him goods and services. His crops rotted in the fields because he had no farm workers, he was unable to get deliveries of food and supplies, and he found himself neatly cut off from the community. By 1880, the “Boycott Treatment” was being used in other places, and the word q
