Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia

Series Editor's Foreword

series editor’s foreword ix This volume in the Studies in Early American Economy and Society, a collaborative effort between the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), offers a distinctive perspective on the economic lives of very early North Americans. One of the core objectives of PEAES has been to advance research about the early American economy which has been flourishing in recent years under the broadened umbrella of numerous disciplines , methodologies, and subjects. Alongside this book series, PEAES brings together scholars and writers working in areas such as commerce, business, banking, technology, and material culture in its fellowship program , seminars, public outreach programs, conferences, and published conference proceedings. PEAES is also engaged in the ongoing acquisition of sources that are incorporated into the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Ann Smart Martin takes an extended interdisciplinary look at the storekeeping activities of one merchant in one North American locale. She reconstructs his extensive economic engagements with myriad people throughout regional and Atlantic markets who actively shaped the production, distribution, and consumption of seemingly disconnected goods in seemingly invisible relationships. Martin’s methodology is eclectic, ably blending the approaches of art historians, material culture specialists, and social and economic historians in order to reach beyond many of our typical assumptions about what a country merchant and his customers did in North America’s early modern era. She recreates not only one place in time but the sweeping networks of buying and selling that shaped connections reaching outward across the Atlantic Ocean and deeply into the colonial interior. The world of exchange and consumption for her backcountry Virginia storekeeper was one of color and variety, active efforts to satisfy consumer choices, and intricate accounting for essential and exotic commodities. Each chapter takes us further into the lives of ordinary Americans on the developing frontier by highlighting a particular object and analyzing its multifaceted meanings for farmers, housekeepers, and slaves who shopped at country stores. Along the way, Martin challenges a number of our longstanding notions about how early Americans lived in a “world of goods” that carried meanings not only about credit, prices, and the quality of material objects but also about status, race, and gender in a rapidly changing frontier environment. Cathy Matson Professor of History University of Delaware Director, Program in Early American Economy and Society The Library Company of Philadelphia x Series Editor’s Foreword ...