History Seminar

Abstract: My talk tells a new story of money and labor in early America in four artifacts: a page from a treasurer's account book, a mortgage of two enslaved people, testimony from a counterfeiting case, and a list of convicts transported from Bristol to South Carolina. Far from neutral and natural, both paper money and convict labor were contested social relationships in early American history. This talk explores some of the ways early Americans produced money and labor and to what ends, their social lives and meanings, and how specific forms of money and labor shaped political economies and hierarchies of difference.