Circulating Counterfeits: Making Money and Its Meanings in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

This dissertation examines the social, cultural, and political history of counterfeiting in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. It argues that counterfeiting was an illegal economic activity that, much like smuggling or piracy, thrived in the interstices of a commercial empire. Counterfeiters, this project shows, worked in deliberate and organized ways that took advantage of the unstandardized money supply and the patchwork nature of colonial legal codes. They built regional, interregional, and even transatlantic networks that operated much like other eighteenth-century businesses, relying on personal and kinship ties to produce and distribute counterfeit coins and paper notes over vast distances. The presence of counterfeits, in turn, shaped the everyday practices and politics of the marketplace at a key moment in the transition to modern capitalism. Ordinary people engaged in close, multisensory inspection of money to determine its authenticity. But they also suspended disbelief and accepted questionable currency, relying on payment practices that were open-ended and deeply social to protect them if money later proved bad. Counterfeiting was also deeply enmeshed in local, imperial, and, eventually, national politics during the eighteenth century. Administrators on both sides of the Atlantic cared deeply about counterfeiting, a crime that was typically prosecuted as high treason as it contravened the Crown’s prerogative to regulate money. Debates about counterfeits and their makers became important sites for working out the balance between imperial and local authority. With the coming of the American Revolution, the politics of counterfeiting intensified, and counterfeiting became an important weapon of war. Meanwhile, debates about the importation of large quantities of British-manufactured counterfeits into the Caribbean openly challenged British authority in the region. This project concludes that counterfeiting was a potent and overlooked force in daily economic life, imperial commerce, and politics in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world