The 2023 WMQ–EMSI Workshop
“Money in Vast Early America”
December 8-9, 2023
Christine Desan, Convener
When economics ascended as a discipline in the late nineteenth century, it categorized “money” as a subject that was its own. That development stripped money of its history. Early American communities had struggled over how to represent value, package it as a medium, and use it to extract and distribute resources. The results surfaced in commentary, legislation, and the very architectures and ideologies of exchange, empire, sustenance, and development. But once claimed by economics, money became a simple means of measure, the term in which a price was written. Historians withdrew from the field, treating money as either a transparent fact of life or an abstruse topic beyond their competency.
New approaches to money reclaim it as a practice central to early American communities. This WMQ-EMSI Workshop aims to bring together scholars from history and related disciplines who seek to understand how diverse groups—including Indigenous- and African-descended peoples, European settlers, and imperial officials across the Americas and the Atlantic—created money and related media. The workshop will take a broad view of the subject matter: We define “money” to include phenomena intended to signify and circulate value. We invite submissions that treat money, so defined, as a project that differed across time and space and operated according to divergent designs. We are interested in the ways that money, as a political, legal, social, and conceptual practice, engaged communities and brought them into conflict with each other, as well as in the ways that understanding money’s history illuminates “capitalism” and its monetary infrastructure. The workshop welcomes scholarship that excavates the rich territory that is money from different disciplinary or interdisciplinary angles.
Participants will discuss a pre-circulated, unpublished chapter-length portion of their current work in progress along with the work of other participants. Subsequently, the convener, Christine Desan of Harvard University, will write an essay elaborating on the issues raised at the workshop for publication in the William and Mary Quarterly.
Program of Events
"Money in Vast Early America"
Friday, December 8, 2023
9:00-9:30 am (PT)
Coffee
9:30-10:00 am
- Welcome: Joshua Piker, Omohundro Institute
- Convener’s Introduction: Christine Desan, Harvard Law School
10:00-11:00 am
Session 1
Simon Middleton, William & Mary
“Current Money and Community in Early America”
Commentator: Tawny Paul, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Session 2
Katie Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Promise to Pay: The Power and Politics of Money in Early America”
Commentator: Andrew Konove, University of Texas at San Antonio
Chair: Carolyn Eastman, Virginia Commonwealth University
12:00-1:30 pm
Lunch
1:30-2:30 pm
Session 3
Sharon Murphy, Providence College
“Merchant Bankers and Plantation Finance in Antebellum Louisiana”
Commentator: Farley Grubb, University of Delaware
Chair: Joshua Greenberg
2:30-3:00
Afternoon coffee
3:00-4:00
Session 4
Andrew Edwards, University of St. Andrews
“Money and Moravians: A Study in Monetary Change, 1752–1837”
Commentator: Kimberly Welch, Vanderbilt University
Chair: Joshua Piker, Omohundro Institute
Saturday, December 9, 2023
9:00-9:30 am (PT)
Coffee
9:30-10:30 am
Session 5
Kimberly Welch, Vanderbilt University
“The Stability of Fortunes: Black Americans and Finance in the Nineteenth Century”
Commentator: Sharon Murphy, Providence College
Chair: Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
10:30-11:30 am
Session 6
Farley Grubb, University of Delaware
“Chronic Specie Scarcity and Efficient Barter: The Problem of Maintaining an Outside Money Supply in British Colonial America”
Commentator: Simon Middleton, William & Mary
Chair: Carolyn Eastman, Virginia Commonwealth University
11:30 am – 1:00 pm
Lunch
1:00-2:00 pm
Session 7
Andrew Konove, University of Texas at San Antonio
“Making Change: Money, Trust, and Sovereignity in Mexico, 1750–1850”
Commentator: Andrew Edwards, University of St. Andrews
Chair: Joshua Greenberg
2:00-3:00 pm
Session 8
Tawny Paul, University of California, Los Angeles
“Commodified Bodies: Debt and Labor in the British Atlantic”
Commentator: Katie Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair: Joshua Piker, Omohundro Institute
3:00-3:30 pm
Afternoon coffee
3:30-4:30 pm
Final Discussion
Moderator: Christine Desan, Harvard Law School