Political Profit and the Invention of Modern Currency Dror Goldberg Department of Economics Bar Ilan University Abstract The Massachusetts currency of 1690 was the first inconvertible paper money to be supported solely by a legal tender law. The circumstances that led to its creation exceed the typical story of wartime specie shortage. Due to temporary political constraints of that turbulent period, the currency could be neither backed by land nor granted a full legal tender status, as was then standard. Instead, it had to be disguised from England as a simple, private-like IOU. By pleasing both its pay-demanding troops and England, the government maximized its probability of survival subject to the constraints. *
[email protected]. I thank John Hanson for his guidance. I benefited from suggestions and comments of Katherine Engel, Farley Grubb, Richard Johnson, John McCusker, William Roberds, James Rosenheim, Winifred Rothenberg, Peter Rousseau, George Selgin, Richard Sylla, and seminar participants at Texas A&M University and at the ASSA, EHS, and SSHA meetings. The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University provided financial support. 1 Monetary innovation, the development of new forms of money, has not received much systematic study from economic historians. Richard Sylla, “Monetary Innovation in America” 1. Introduction Paper money is one of the most powerful political and economic tools in history. Its Chinese inventors supported it first with convertibility but later simply forced everyone to accept it in trade (or else). Our modern paper money, in contrast, has a much weaker legal status: it merely discharges monetary obligations (e.g., contractual debts and taxes), which are denominated in its unit of account.