Is money a democratic medium in an age of empire? This panel explores the roles of conflicting and complementary forms of finance in the British and French empires during the Age of Revolution. Participant papers show how even within seemingly monolithic imperial states, multiple monetary regimes could and did coexist. This multiplicity suggests that, historically, people creating monetary alternatives need not control all levers of power in order to effect significant – even revolutionary – change.
Presentations and Discussion
James Livesey – University of Dundee “Local Debt for Local People: Debt and the Languedoc 1750-1789” Andrew David Edwards – University of Oxford “Money to Burn; Money to Spend: A Tale of Two Monies at the Beginning of the American Revolution” Elizabeth Cross – Georgetown University “The French East India Company and the Monetary Politics of the French Revolution” E. George Gallwey – Harvard University “From Distribution to the Protection of Private Property: The Politics of Money and Credit in the Early United States”
This interdisciplinary panel examines periods of transformative monetary change in the 19th and 20th century. Participants’ research revises conventional portrayals of antebellum banking and its political/legal legacies, financial policy from the Fed’s creation until the era of Great Depression reform, and political debates over money from the New Deal to the rise of “neoliberalism.” Taken together, these papers treat the character of governmental monetary practices as an integral part of a contested political economy and examine how a range of actors shape monetary institutions, possibilities for political action, and ultimately the nation’s economic life.
Nathan Tankus – Clarke Business Law Institute at Cornell Law School “The Shaky Constitutional Foundations of Antebellum American Money: Bank Charters as Delegations of Power” David M. P. Freund – University of Maryland “State Building for a Free Market: Financial Reform and the Rise of Monetary Orthodoxy in the United States, 1913-1935” Jakob Feinig – Binghamton University, SUNY “What is Neoliberal about Neoliberal Money? Forgetting Money’s Public Purpose” Commentator: Andrew David Edwards – University of Oxford
