Credit Nation and the Reconfiguration of Early American and Imperial History

Abstract

Claire Priest’s Credit Nation is a remarkably innovative piece of scholarship. In this book Priest demonstrates that anyone seriously interested in the emergence of “capitalism” in America needs to start by studying the law and its institutions in the colonial era. It was in the colonial era, Priest shows, that a distinctive version of property law emerged, one that in the vast majority of situations prioritized credit and liquidity over the security of property. “The ease of access to credit” established in the colonial era, Priest argues, “was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America.” Certainly, as she shows, the passage of the Debt Recovery Act of 1732 was followed by a period “of great colonial economic expansion, driven by credit” in the 1740s. While my colleagues have emphasized Priest’s seminal contributions with respect to legal and economic history, I wanted to draw attention to the profound implications of Priest’s work for colonial and imperial history. In essence, I am suggesting appendixes to Chapter 9 that would interpret the significance of Priest’s findings for still more audiences.