Credit Nation

Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation presents a new vision of American economic history, examining how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial and founding eras of the republic. Claire Priest describes how the British Parliament enacted laws for the colonies that privileged creditors by defining land and slaves as commodities available to satisfy debts. Colonial governments, in turn, created local legal institutions that enabled people to further leverage their property to obtain credit. Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and how increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America.