- Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia
Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia analyzes deliberately and illustrates unintentionally material culture's many seductions. Ann Smart Martin explores how "goods of the Atlantic world [were distributed] to colonists moving ever westward" (1) and how colonists imbued goods with meanings. Martin focuses "on the life and business of one country merchant, Scottish-born John Hook (1745-1809)…[who] may be the best-documented merchant in eighteenth-century Virginia" (2). Hook immigrated to Virginia as a thirteen-year-old [End Page 285] apprentice in 1758. Upon reaching his majority, Hook joined as a junior member in a partnership that included a new store in Bedford County, east of the Blue Ridge's James River gap. Following the partnership's dissolution shortly before the American Revolution, Hook focused increasingly on tobacco production with a retail sideline until his death in 1809.
The book ably charts commercial capillaries by which Atlantic goods flowed to colonial hinterlands. Wealthy Virginians directed shopping by urban merchants, friends, or family members in the colonies or in Britain, funding purchases primarily via tobacco consignments. More economically significant were retail purchases by other Virginians, including slaves, from merchants and peddlers selling to crowds drawn by court days at county seats; the credit merchants extended to local purchasers generally was redeemed for tobacco, grain, butter, hides, or, later, cotton. Martin renders clearly merchant anxieties about retailing to such diverse markets: throughout the mercantile passage from English makers to American consumers, poor selection, rough handling, rats, moths, mold, and thieves all menaced the stuff of which dreams were made.
Martin discusses many varieties of merchandise, but ultimately her accounting indicates that bulk textiles, clothing, and alcohol comprised over half of Hook's gross sales in 1771. These and Hook's other goods had many contexts: an Atlantic milieu, a village store, and backcountry neighbors who included an aspiring gentry, increasingly market-oriented middling sorts, brawling lower-class whites, free blacks, and slaves. Each chapter concludes with an interpretive vignette about specific artifacts: a case clock, iron dishes, merchant ledgers, a house, ribbons, mirrors.
Hook's early career coincided with Virginia retail's golden age, a period of expanding credit and high profits, and as Hook prospered, so too did Martin's analysis. When Hook's career hit a rough patch during the Revolution, Martin's assessment likewise faltered. Hook's mobility complicates her evaluation of his commercial operations: in 1782 he moved from his main store to his plantation, subsequently opening a smaller store managed by a storekeeper at Hale's Ford on Roanoke River, in the newly created Franklin County. Ultimately, however, Martin's choices, not Hook's, create a confusing and incomplete account.
The confusion begins with Martin's uncertainty over whose narrative to emphasize. John Hook is one likely candidate, and Martin unwraps Hook's career meticulously until 1773 before abruptly lunging ahead to his 1777 mobbing by neighbors who accused him as a Tory and stopped his business. Thereafter Martin depicts Hook's actions inchoately. A second candidate for narrative mainstay is the world of goods, although that world is singularly foggy; Martin assures her readers that "clearly something different is going on in the larger Virginia back-country" (66), but the "five basic cultural choices backcountry people made in their relationship to the world of goods" (108) — to differentiate, simplify, exaggerate, hybridize, or replicate — appear universal. Nor does Martin's backcountry definition offer much orientation: "'Backcountry' was a way to be" (134). Martin's narrative also might have taken for an axis the consumers of her subtitle, particularly lower class white men, slaves, and women, all of whom appear without the robust quantitative analysis necessary to characterize them collectively. [End Page 286]
Martin confides that "As a quantifier I felt comfortable with my numbers and words" (173), but social historians will note the absence of reassuring artifacts such as median, mode, standard deviation, and outlier. Numerous tallies appear, but the...