Money and the Making of the American Revolution

BOOK REVIEW: Money and the Making of the American Revolution by Andrew David Edwards (Princeton University Press, 2025). $35.00 hardcover

In 1953, Edmund and Helen Morgan published The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, a pathbreaking study of the earliest days of the imperial crisis which preceded the American Revolution.[1] Their contention, that the conflict grew into a debate about constitutional rights and the nature of sovereignty owing to the fact that the Stamp Act itself presented little burden to colonists, has proven to be foundational in the historiography of the Revolution. Several generations of scholarship, including the work done by Bernard Bailyn and other neo-Whigs to unpack the “logic of Revolution” rest at least in part on the Morgan’s understanding of the Stamp Act.[2] That the colonists could have paid the taxes levied on them had they wanted to is something of a truism in the study of Revolutionary causality.

Andrew David Edwards’ Money and the Making of the American Revolution seeks to disrupt that consensus by arguing that the colonists did not have the specie required to pay the taxes and therefore their outrage over its burden should be read by historians as genuine. Specie is the operative word in his argument, for Edwards draws his conclusions based on a thoroughly grounded understanding of the nature of money in colonial America. Importantly, he notes that colonial finances “worked” by using bills of credit. This unique system of currency, wherein paper money represented a temporary store of value held against a tax debt and would eventually be burned by the government following payment of the tax, was commonly used in America but not in Britain, making currency a key point of divergence between the metropole and the American colonies prior to the end of the Seven Year’s War. Edwards argues that in addition to raising revenues, British officials hoped to use the Stamp Act and other taxes like it, which required payment in hard currency, to align colonial monetary systems with Britain, wherein currency represented a fixed point of value redeemable for a certain amount of specie.

His argument unfolds in three parts. First, he charts the intellectual underpinnings of bills of credit and the ways in which they emerged in the colonies to solve political-economic problems engendered by the chronic specie shortages which plagued the mainland American colonies throughout the eighteenth century. This section draws on a number of economic treatises and schemes for imperial reform, some written by well-known figures like John Locke and others written by obscure administrators like John Blackwell, a one-time member of parliament and officer in Cromwell’s government who emigrated to New England in the 1680s. The second section offers Edwards’ narrative of the imperial crisis which he categorizes as an issue of “money and the way it worked in a reforming empire.”[3] Although his primary focus is on the impact of reform in Britain’s mainland North American colonies, Edwards takes in evidence from across the British Empire, including the Caribbean and British India, to demonstrate the ways that currency reform proved central to the unfolding revolution. The final section examines monetary policy in the nascent United States during the course of the Revolutionary War. Edwards ably shows how the use of bills of credit expanded to finance the initial phases of the war before the logic of the currency collapsed in the face of wartime pressure on patriot governments. In the process, he also critically examines the “patriot economy” and how debates over currency and decisions made in the late 1770s and 1780s contributed to the development of a recognizably modern capitalist system in the early republic.

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Edwards’ causal explanation sits comfortably alongside other pieces of “neo-imperial” scholarship, which is perhaps the dominant historiographical paradigm through which historians are currently interpreting the American Revolution. The work of a range of historians, including Trevor Burnard, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Eliga H. Gould, Steve Pincus, Justin Du Rivage, Amy Watson, and Maya Jasanoff among many others, have demonstrated the degree to which the American Revolution was inextricably linked to questions of empire, commerce, capitalism, and the British state.[4] By examining the conflict through currency relationships, however, Edwards more critically examines the relationship between the Revolution and the development of an imperially minded capitalist economy during the early republic which is a hallmark of neo-imperial analysis. Throughout the Revolution, American governments “faced a choice: either … establish an alternative system that could reshape [capitalism] … or embody capitalism so as to be empowered within it.” As he demonstrates in Part III, “the United States ultimately chose the latter path.”[5]

Where there are issues with his argument is in its fine mechanics and in its implications. For example, if currency debates were central to the Revolution, why did heavy resistance begin with the Stamp Act of 1765 and not the Currency Act of 1764? As the conflict extended, how did currency sustain and transform revolutionary ideology when, by Edwards’ own admission, at the time of independence “the money question that had precipitated the crisis nearly a decade earlier was no longer explicit in the debate,” even “if it had not disappeared”?[6] Why, if the determination of currency was the vital plank of revolution, were governments willing to dispense with bills of credit in favor of hard currency during times of hardship even when doing so “abandoned the basis of their Revolution?”[7]

These questions point to a larger conundrum underlying neo-imperial scholarship, one which Edwards acknowledges in his introduction: “how [did] a set of fundamentally material concerns, such as money and taxation,” become “a profound and extraordinarily influential language of rights and freedoms without losing any of its specificity?” The presence of this paradox does not detract from the strength of his evidence. Instead, it suggests that much of what recent historians have done to uncover the imperial origins of the Revolution represents “the beginning of an answer, not the whole story.”[8] The task for historians of the Revolution going forward will be to resolve this contradiction and generate a better understanding of the linkages between imperial reform and ideology. Edwards’ volume represents an admirable start to that process, one which is sure to spark much debate moving forward.

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[1] Edmund Morgan and Helen S. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

[2] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 50th Anniversary Edition, (Belknap, 2017 [1967]).

[3] Andrew David Edwards, Money and the Making of the American Revolution (Princeton, 2025), 97.

[4] See for example: Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (Yale, 2024); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Steven Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (Yale University Press, 2016); Justin A. Du Rivage, Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (Yale University Press, 2017); Amy Watson, Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763 (Yale University Press, 2025); Maya Jansanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Penguin, 2012).

[5] Edwards, Money, 13.

[6] Ibid., 173.

[7] Ibid., 270.

[8] Ibid., 10.