Bills of Union

This book brings together for the first time more than half a dozen proposals, including several which have never been studied before, to show how thinkers on empire drew on monetary thought and banking theory to address the financial, political and constitutional challenges of empire in the years before the American Revolution. The eighteenth century saw many financial experiments as Britons and Americans tried to work out how to manage currency and banking in the British Atlantic. Existing studies have looked at the successes and failures of schemes in individual colonies, but some had grander ambitions, such as Benjamin Franklin, and offered proposals for ‘imperial’ or ‘continental’ currencies and banks that would knit together the entire empire in North America and the West Indies. This book makes an important contribution to the wider scholarship not just of banking, currency and financial thought but also empire, politics and the American Revolution. It will be of interest to academics working on the history of finance, banking and currency in the British Isles and North America in the eighteenth century, as well as those working on the political economy of the British Empire, such as mercantilism, trade, warfare, and the politics of empire in the decades leading up to the American Revolution.