Abstract: Money has recently regained a history. Long set aside as a commodity, convention, or empty instrumentality, money figures increasingly in recent scholarship as a consequential subject of debate and design in early America. That development invites attention to the strange historiography of money and its recent turn. Money’s modern historiography dates to the Enlightenment, when the narrative took hold that money was essentially a transparent technology, one that transmitted determinations about value made independently by individuals as agents. After tracing that narrative and its impact in organizing contemporary assumptions and disciplines, this essay considers emerging approaches to money as represented by the papers presented at the 2023 WMQ -EMSI Workshop, “Money in Vast Early America.” Though those approaches vary, they tend to read money as a practice that organizes value rather than simply expressing it. Money appears as a complexly crafted system with formative influence rather than as a mere marker or straightforward mode of measure. Analyzing the historical drama in the workshop papers, this essay argues that societies create money as a respiratory system for capital, one that sources value in viable form, circulates it, and channels its use distinctively around the society that engineers it. Recognizing money as that expansive phenomenon opens a wide new avenue for insight on early America and its capitalist aftermath.

Abstract: This transnational history of entangled marriages crossing the Atlantic contrasts the lived realities of women caught up in the American, French, and Caribbean revolutions with the sentimentalized ideals of republican marriage propagated by male diplomats traveling abroad. These diplomats’ portrayals of freely chosen marriages in America sought to distinguish them from the arranged liaisons of Old Regime Europe. Many of these male observers married American women who had been educated to expect a shared life of friends. Instead, revolutionary politics, war, slavery, and exile disrupted their families, leaving the women alone, abandoned to what Mary Wollstonecraft warned would be a mundane existence. While their husbands claimed the individual rights of citizenship, these women found no role outside the limits of their isolated, companionless households in this transformed society. Drawing on letters, journals, treatises, and novels from both sides of the Atlantic, this article redefines the Atlantic revolutionary experience through women’s perspectives, illustrating how shifting gender norms challenged the promise of familial companionship at the heart of emerging republics. Women in entangled marriages on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to make sense of this tumultuous revolutionary era embodied in individual men, their husbands.

Abstract: This article offers a new way of thinking about the multiplicity of laws and legal systems in the British Empire. It focuses on private commercial law, which had a fundamental and underappreciated role in structuring the empire, and offers a new understanding of attempts to manage imperial legal difference. We can recast and better understand attempts at legal reform and change as policies of emulation (closer alignment) and designed divergence (enhancing variance) vis-à-vis English law. Examining several statutes passed by the imperial Parliament in London reveals how statutory interventions in commercial law ameliorated the challenges of doing business across the empire. They also served as a means to manage imperial legal difference, giving order to an increasingly diverse and global empire. Strategies of imperial management relied on treating component parts of the empire as regional groups. This legal infrastructure functioned as the empire’s ligaments, connecting disparate and distant colonies to each other and to the metropole, and provided a means of organizing the empire.