Counterfeits, Frauds, and the Value of Early Modern Money

The papers on this panel examine the relationship between money, value, and imperial and early national politics between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. They contribute to recent scholarship that has emphasized money’s political, legal, and socio-cultural histories by paying particular attention to the ways that monetary frauds tested the bonds between minting and state power. Lane and Nye explore two mint frauds, one in Potosí in the 1640s and the other in Cairo in the early 1700s, which had significant ramifications for the monetary regimes of the Spanish and Ottoman Empires, respectively. The frauds exposed tensions between local and imperial minting priorities and competing ideas over the composition, quality, and just price of money. Konove’s paper explores a different kind of fraud—the counterfeiting that consumed Mexico in the 1830s. Mexico’s early national copper coins, minted to integrate domestic markets and provide a revenue stream for the federal government, instead undermined the authority of the state as counterfeits became indistinguishable from official coins. Like the Cairo and Potosí cases, the episode tested the balance between a coin’s legal and material values and raised broader questions about who, and what, money was for.