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A Glimpse of Early Modern Governance in Claire Priest’s Credit Nation
Rose, Carol M.
Rose, Carol M.
Abstract
Claire Priest’s remarkable book serves up a whole new view of commercial relations in the colonies that were to become the United States. Her striking revelation of the importance of slavery in colonial commercial innovation will undoubtedly catch the attention of readers and reviewers, coming as it does at a moment when the history of slavery has come under an especially searching spotlight. A second theme that will capture attention runs through the entire book: the countervailing efforts of colonial entrepreneurs to borrow and thus take potentially wealth-producing risks while also leavening risk with now-obsolete property devices like entailed fees.
Both these themes necessitate revisions of conventional views. The first revision, among others, concerns the geography of colonial commercial growth, which, as Claire reveals, very much involved trafficking in enslaved persons. The conventional view of colonial entrepreneurship is that the major location was in the north: Yankee clippers plying the seas, Ben Franklin types setting up print shops, Paul Revere producing silver goods, and so on. But in Claire’s book, the major financial innovators were the southern planters, taking on debt to invest in what looks like industrial agriculture—staple crops like indigo and tobacco—and for that purpose pledging not only their land as surety but their slaves as well.