Promise to Pay

"What is money, and how did specific kinds of currency come to be accepted in the early United States? Katie Moore here uncovers how American norms around money took shape and what kinds of power relationships they encoded. Drawing on the work not only of historians but of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and economists, Moore summons a colonial world where different systems of money and value competed for dominance. Some forms of exchange were official, others informal, some interregional, others local-all of them, Moore shows, social phenomena: ways of revealing how early Americans evaluated qualities like trust and judgment, not just value"--