Promise to Pay

Reviews / Votes

"Promise to Pay offers a capacious and compelling account of the American colonies' pathbreaking efforts to make their own paper money and use it to forge a new social order. Moore shows how struggles over the power to create currency structured colonial politics at every level, from royal officials and provincial assemblies to merchants and planters, landlords and laborers, settlers and Native societies, and enslavers and enslaved people. Bringing the central insights of the new history of money brilliantly to bear on the mainland British colonies from New England to the Chesapeake, this landmark study places monetary politics at the core of conflicts over conquest and colonization, progress and poverty, warfare and welfare, and political authority and autonomy from the late seventeenth century to the eve of the American Revolution." -- Jeffrey P. Sklansky, author of 'Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America' "This highly accessible work on a relatively esoteric subject makes a valuable contribution to early American history." * Choice * Moore's goal is to return "money to history and his-tory to money." Across seven chapters she does both in remarkable style. Moore's essential insight is that money is fluid, motile, that it changes, shifting economic practices and societies in ways that more comparative histories often miss. * American Historical Review *