Grenville's Silver Hammer: The Problem of Money in the Stamp Act Crisis

Edwards, Andrew David

doi:10.1093/jahist/jax172

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Towards the end of the colonial era, Britain sided with the latter, severely limiting monetary loops and imposing dues payable in specie: It limited the main “paper” component of the money supply while draining what little silver there was. Protests against the Stamp Act were so heated in part because of the restrictive monetary context in which it occurred, and they were as much about monetary design as they were about taxation (Edwards, 2017b; Tankus, 2015).…”

Section: Monetary Loops and The Question Of Independencementioning

confidence: 99%

Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes

Feinig¹

2020

J Historical Sociology

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Charles Tilly emphasizes that state formation is a contingent and violent process: states develop as they extract resources, including currency, from a population. Neochartalist approaches to money challenge what I call the extractivist view of state formation because they see currencies as public institutions established by governments, not a resource to be seized from a population. At the same time, neochartalists rarely address how state institutions capable of establishing monetary institutions emerge. In this article, I propose a framework to analyze the entangled development of the institutions of money and state. I then showcase its usefulness by revisiting a series of crowd actions and militarized responses in eighteenth-century Massachusetts and Pennsylvania today known as Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, focusing on the initially ad hoc and then routinized funding mechanism that enabled emerging state actors to deploy armed groups. In closing, I argue that despite the violence involved in the emergence of the institutions of state and money, citizens and inhabitants can begin to imagine democratic ways of institutionalizing money today. In War Making and State Making as Organized Crime (1985), Charles Tilly argues that extraction, dispossession, and violence are so central to state formation processes that the latter can be compared to organized crime. His argument can be summarized as follows: Emerging state actors (violently or otherwise coercively) seize goods, workers, and money. These resources, in turn, enable new rounds of extraction. A host of contributions on the "fiscal-military state" (e.g.

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Section: Monetary Loops and The Question Of Independencementioning

confidence: 99%