2009 Hagley Prize Winner

The 2009 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history has been awarded to Ann Smart Martin for Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). The award is presented annually by the Hagley Library and the Business History Conference; the 2009 prize committee included Donald C. Jackson (Lafayette College, chair), Margaret Walsh (University of Nottingham), and Janice Traflet (Bucknell University).

In this book Ann Smart Martin brings the global economy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries to life by connecting the lives of merchants, farmers, and artisans in the hinterlands of western Virginia to the larger world of European commerce and fashion.

With a fine-grained focus on the Scottish-born merchant Robert Hook and his shops in the crossroad communities of New London and Hales Ford, Martin’s analysis extends both out towards the Atlantic trade and into the lives of rural settlers. It is these common patrons, so often seemingly invisible to modern historians, who saw in Hook a means of experiencing the “world of goods” that in essential ways defined their culture and their lives.

The human dimension of business history lies at the core of the book. Beginning with the credit crisis of 1772 Martin makes extraordinary use of Hook’s surviving account books to explicate the nature of backcountry commerce. She highlights the myriad ways that adornment and fashion created a market in rural Virginia for wares ranging from colorful ribbons to ornate grandfather clocks.

Martin offers a sophisticated material culture analysis of remarkable scope and insight; this involves not simply goods sold but also the stores themselves and the way that they physically defined the shopping experience. And finally, the book includes an expansive exploration into the ways that enslaved African-Americans participated in market relations at a time when they too could be bought and sold as commodities. In this latter chapter, her exploration of the cultural meanings of mirrors (“looking glass”) to people of African heritage is particularly noteworthy and brings to the forefront the wealth of research and insight that undergirds the book as a whole.

Written with a deft eye for telling detail and inculcated with a desire to make the complex character of 18th century commerce engaging to a wide audience, Buying into the World of Goods represents business history at its finest.

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