Description
Book SynopsisAmericans have always had a love-hate relationship with possessions. Early Americans suspected luxuries as a corrupting force that would lead to an aristocracy. In Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World, Phyllis Whitman Hunter demonstrates how...
Trade ReviewThe strength of Hunter's analysis lies in her emphasis on patterns of consumption, rather than production, as well as in her dependence on detailed case studies to illustrate each shift in this budding American consumerism.... Her analysis makes a significant contribution to the study of early American economic culture.
* Virginia Quarterly Review *
The core of this book is an imaginative and insightful use of secondary sources, individual biography, and material culture to reveal the processes of the anglicization of eighteenth-century consumer culture.
-- Jonathan M. Chu, University of Massachusetts–Boston, * Business History *
Hunter's fine study examines the cultural transformation of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts, from Puritan communities into diverse Georgian cities that were linked to the Atlantic world.
* Choice *
