Money and Politics in Early America

In a recent essay, Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen identified early American finance as an area of potential “cross-pollination” between the New Economic History and the New History of Capitalism. As he rightly noted, the time period “has been extensively studied by economists and economic historians but less so by historians of capitalism.”1 Answering this call, the three papers in this panel interrogate and build on the scholarship of economic historians using the tools of historians. In particular, all three add a political lens to financial developments of the colonial and revolutionary periods. Katie Moore situates debates over colonial money and banking within the larger debate over monopoly power and the needs of the labor market. Jonah Estess examines the politicization of money during the revolutionary era as the root of America’s nineteenth-century aversion to a national monetary regime. And Christina Carrick reassesses the influence of Loyalists who opposed the Revolution on the financial and diplomatic policies of the new United States government. Far from being at cross purposes, economic historians and historians of capitalism share common ground, as this panel demonstrates.
1 Barry Eichengreen, “Financial History, Historical Analysis, and the New History of Finance Capital,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1, no. 1 (2019): 25.