Making and Valuing Money in the Americas, 17th – 19th centuries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Our panel showcases new work on the history of money in the Americas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The historiography has focused on silver extraction and mints in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. We take a more capacious approach to move beyond the traditional Spanish empire perspective and “colonial” periodization. Individual papers focus on regional case studies, but the panel is transimperial. This hemispheric viewpoint highlights similarities in the ways people (colonists, forced migrants, etc.) accorded cultural and economic value to coins. We are interested in a broad spectrum of perspectives, ranging from that of men of African-decent who labored in the mint at Potosí, to those of women from India who made jewelry out of their coin wages. National currencies today bare little semblance to their origins in bullion coins, but they do circulate in international markets that have a long history (Spanish pesos passed hands in Massachusetts). Our panel examines the production and circulation of money over three centuries to historicize processes that might appear to be contemporary phenomenon (such as the scarcity of change in twenty-first century Mexico), but that have their foundation in early modern fiscal policies.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Tatiana Seijas, Rutgers University

Chair

• Tatiana Seijas, Rutgers University

Individual Presentations

• Black, White, and Silver: Policing Money Production in Colonial Potosí - James Almeida, Harvard University

• Clandestine Minting in British America: The Case of Massachusetts - Mara H Caden, Massachusetts Historical Society

• In Search of a “Decent Coin”: The Value of Small Change in Bourbon Spanish America - Andrew P Konove, University of Texas at San Antonio

• The Social Lives of Coins in Eighteenth-Century Peru - Emily A Engel, University of California Santa Barbara

• Valuing labor: Slavery, indenture, and circulating silver in British Guiana, 1830s-1890s - Louise Moschetta