The Weight of Necessity
Counterfeit Coins in the British Atlantic World, circa 1760-1800
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3247153 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katherine Smoak (corresponding author), Katherine Smoak Katherine Smoak |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 74 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 467 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5309/willmaryquar.74.3.0467 |
| OpenAlex | W2738189717 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 23 |
Though ubiquitous in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, counterfeit coins have received little scholarly attention. This article reconstructs the imperial trade in counterfeit foreign coin in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a time when British and American merchants, ship captains, and even officials strategically exported bad coin to the Caribbean, profiting from the region's heterogeneous money supply and rapidly shifting economic and political conditions. Examining the counterfeit trade from Rhode Island to Jamaica in the 1770s and then from Birmingham to the eastern Caribbean in the 1790s highlights the trade's size, persistence, complexity, and eventual expansion from a colonial commerce to a metropolitan industry. Colonial governors', the Board of Trade's, and eventually Parliament's fraught attempts to demonetize bad coin reveal how embedded counterfeits were in economic life. Caribbean residents used bad coins in ways that best suited local circumstances, sometimes in implicit and sometimes in outright violation of metropolitan policy and the king's prerogative to regulate coin. Decades before the official rejection of commodity coin, people on the fringes of empire insisted that money's value came from ease of use and widespread acceptability, rather than metallic content. Debates about counterfeits thus became important sites for questioning the limits of metropolitan authority and the very definition of money itself
Archaeology · Colonialism · Commodity · Counterfeit · Economics · Economy · Empire · Metropolitan area · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Prerogative · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law
The social meaning of money
Economic thought and ideology in seventeenth century England
Villains of all nations
Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England
Process and Pattern in Culture
An Ungovernable People
Instruments, travel and science
The History of Jamaica
Contraband
Capitalism by Gaslight
A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis
The Making of National Money
Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower
The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves
Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves
Rules, rights and redemption
A History of Currency in the British Colonies
Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740
Pillaging the Empire
Soundings in Atlantic History
A Turbulent Time
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2021 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |