Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia)

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Description

How did people living at the early American frontier discover and then transform part of the market economy? How do their purchases and their choices revise our understanding of the market revolution and the emerging consumer ethos? Ann Smart Martin provides answers to these questions by examining the texture of trade at the edge of the upper Shenandoah Valley between 1760 and 1810.

Reconstructing the world of one country merchant, John Hook, Martin reveals how the acquisition of consumer goods created and validated a set of ideas about taste, fashion, and way of life in a particular place at a particular time. Her analysis of Hook’s account ledger illuminates the on a regular basis wants, transactions, and tensions recorded within and brings some of Hook’s customers to life: a planter searching for just the appropriate clock, a farmer on the lookout for nails, a young woman and her friends out shopping on their own, and a slave woman choosing a having a look glass.

This innovative approach melds fascinating narratives with sophisticated analysis of material culture to distill large abstract social and economic systems into intimate triangulations among merchants, customers, and objects. Martin finds that objects not only reflect culture, they’re the means to create it.


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