Promise to Pay - (American Beginnings, 1500-1900) by Katie A Moore

About the Book

"What is money, and how did specific kinds of currency come to be accepted in the early United States? Katie Moore here uncovers how American norms around money took shape and what kinds of power relationships they encoded. Drawing on the work not only of historians but of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and economists, Moore summons a colonial world where different systems of money and value competed for dominance. Some forms of exchange were official, others informal, some interregional, others local-all of them, Moore shows, social phenomena: ways of revealing how early Americans evaluated qualities like trust and judgment, not just value"--

Book Synopsis

An incisive account of the crucial role money played in the formation and development of British North America.

Promise to Pay follows America's first paper money--the "bills of credit" of British North America--from its seventeenth-century origins as a means of war finance to its pivotal role in catalyzing the American Revolution. Katie A. Moore combs through treasury records, account books, and the bills themselves to tell a new story of money's origins that challenges economic orthodoxy and mainstream histories. Promise to Pay shows how colonial governments imposed paper bills on settler communities through existing labor and kinship relations, their value secured by thousands of individual claims on the public purse--debts--and the state's promise to take them back as payment for taxes owed. Born into a world of hierarchy and deference, early American money eroded old social ties and created new asymmetries of power, functioning simultaneously as a ticket to the world of goods, a lifeline for those on the margins, and a tool of imperial domination.

Grounded in sustained engagement with scholarship from multiple disciplines, Promise to Pay breathes new life into old debates and offers an incisive account of the centrality of money in the politics and conflicts of empire, community, and everyday life.

Review Quotes

"This highly accessible work on a relatively esoteric subject makes a valuable contribution to early American history."-- "Choice"

About the Author

Katie A. Moore is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.