Ann Smart Martin examines two counties in backcountry Virginia, part of the “shifting edge” of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. She asks how and why the residents of those counties bought into the world of consumer goods. In answering the how, Martin builds on works by Jacob Price, Carole Shammas, and others who have shown that by the late eighteenth century, the manufacture and distribution of goods in the Atlantic world had become sophisticated and competitive. To answer the mo...