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Buying Into The World Of Goods: Eighteenth-Century Consumerism And The Retail Trade From London To The Virginia Frontier, Ann Smart Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This is a study of the cultural problem of consumerism. It examines the complex, rich, and multi-varied world of consumer goods in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, when traditional notions of hierarchy were increasingly challenged by new patterns of social and geographical mobility and changing measures of human worth. It was also a time when more and more consumer goods came into the lives of average men and women.;Few historians have scrutinized the role of those goods or the means and motives for their acquisition. Objects become an important part of the story of consumerism, however, by examining affordability (commodities and value), availability …