American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America鈥檚 founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America. The colonial rebels refocused their resistance on democratic, local control鈥攄efending the power they had used to make money for themselves.
Edwards鈥檚 narrative spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans. His analysis emerges from the story itself, through the lives of individuals ranging from John Blackwell, Oliver Cromwell’s one-time war treasurer, to Thomas Paine, the impassioned pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Edwards argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned European empire had established a stronghold in the new republic. Money and the Making of the American Revolution offers both an ambitious new interpretation of the Revolution and a fascinating story about the power of economic ideas.
Andrew David Edwards is lecturer in early American history at the University of St Andrews.
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“In this spellbinding account, Edwards exposes the profound monetary drama that shaped America’s colonial governance, its Revolution, and ultimately its capitalist future. A brilliant history that opens money and its making to view, along with the consequences they carry for the society we create.”—Christine Desan, author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism
“Money and the Making of the American Revolution is one of the most important recent books on the coming of the American Revolution. One of the book’s many strengths is Andrew David Edwards’s character-driven narrative. Another is Edwards’s deft explanations of complex financial instruments. For historians who recognize the importance of paper money and want to know more about how it worked, this book will be required reading.”—Eliga Gould, author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire
“Andrew David Edwards boldly reimagines the story of the American Revolution not as a rebellion against parliamentary taxation but as a contest over the medium in which taxes are paid. Money and the Making of the American Revolution centers money as a dynamic institution in North American colonization, revolution, and capitalism, following its transformation from the colonists’ temporary paper currency to the Americans’ durable yet mobile form of wealth. Beautifully narrated with a new cast of revolutionary characters, this book finally offers a satisfying explanation of the causes and consequences of the revolution that is at once ideological and material.”—Katie A. Moore, author of Promise to Pay: The Politics and Power of Money in Early America
“With wit, wisdom, dramatic narrative, and sophisticated analysis, Edwards reinterprets the American Revolution against ‘taxation without representation’ as a war over what the money with which taxes were paid represented. Money and the Making of the American Revolution reframes the capitalist market revolution as a money revolution, transforming money from a temporary means of mobilizing resources into a permanent form of capital accumulation. Edwards compellingly argues that while Britain lost the war over who ruled America, it won the conflict over how the economy of the new nation would be ruled, as a mode of monetary sovereignty based on precious metals and private riches eclipsed colonial models of republican finance.”—Jeffrey Sklansky, author of Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America
“Andrew David Edwards is a gifted historian with a profound ability to connect the previously unconnected while thinking anew about matters long taken for granted. His Money and the Making of the American Revolution is a major reinterpretation of the political economy of the patriot struggle for independence. Global in scope, exact in detail, it is bound to alter standard accounts of the nation’s origins.”—Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
