Public Credit and the Politics of Money From the British Empire to the Early American Republic

Abstract

This dissertation explores the intellectual history of public credit in the British American colonies and early United States. By analyzing arguments made to support the circulation of tradable debts, it shows how the problems of trade and empire in colonial and revolutionary America were tied to conflicts over the distribution and circulation of goods within and outside the polity. The ideology of public credit powerfully linked together ancient and modern discourses on the household and family, the law of nations, and republican imperialism. Provincial innovations in finance helped shape the course of empire, including conceptions of sovereignty and political union, across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with important implications for the origins of American democracy and the structure of the early financial architecture of the United States.