Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Britain: An Historical Survey," in J. K. Eastham, ed., Economic Essays in Commemoration
of the Dundee School of Economics, 1931-1955 (1955).
Price statistics are scanty for this period, but excellent are Anne Bezanson et
al., Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (1935), and Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale
Commodity Prices in the United States, 1100-1861, with Statistical Supplement
(1938); see also George R. Taylor, "Wholesale Commodity Prices at
Charleston, 1732-1791," Journal of Economic and Business History (1932).
The history of money and banking in colonial America is in an unsatisfactory
state. The problem, in general, is that the earlier works are economically sound
but historically out of date, whereas the newer and historically superior writings
are fatally marred by an acceptance of modern inflationist dogma. The only overall
studies, flawed though they are by inflationary bias, are Richard A. Lester, Monetary
Experiments: Early American and Recent Scandinavian (1939), and Curtis
P. Nettels, Money Supply of the American Colonies Before 1720 (1934). Older
but far sounder accounts, from the economic point of view, are Horace White,
Money and Banking Illustrated by American History (1902), and Davis R.
Dewey, Financial History of the United States (1936). A particularly hard-hitting
critique of colonial inflationism is in Charles Jesse Bullock, Essays on the Monetary
History of the United States (1900). Very old but magnificently sound on
monetary economics is William M. Gouge, Short History of Paper Money and
Banking in the United States, Including an Account of Provincial Continental
Paper Money (1833). Specific colonies are treated in Kathryn L. Behrens, Paper
Money in Maryland, 1121-1189 (1923); Clarence P. Gould, Money and Transportation
in Maryland (1915); and, from a sound-money point of view, Donald
L. Kemmerer, "Paper Money in New Jersey, 1668-1775," New Jersey Historical
Society, Proceedings (1956). E. James Ferguson, "Currency Finance: Colonial
Monetary Practices," William and Mary Quarterly (1953), is an inflationist survey.
Particularly valuable is the notable revisionist work by George A. Billias,
The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1140 (1959), which demonstrates that the
inflationary land-bank scheme was put forth and promoted by large merchants
and landowners, and not, as older historians would have it, by a mass of impoverished
debtors.
Andrew M. Davis, ed., Colonial Currency Reprints, 1682-1151 (4 vols., 1910-
11), is a superb source collection of monetary thought and opinion in the colonies
in the first half of the eighteenth century. Harry E. Miller, Banking Theories in
the United States Before 1860 (1927), is excellent if sketchy. Joseph Dorfman's
monumental Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606—1865, vol. 1 (1946),
is indispensable for economic opinion in the colonies, but it does not do justice
to the great hard-money theorist of the colonies, Dr. William Douglass, who,
unfortunately, still lacks a biographer or a systematic study.
On British mercantilism and the American colonies, a good account is provided
in the fourth volume of Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American
History (1938). The Board of Trade is examined in Oliver M. Dickerson, American
Colonial Government, 1696-1165: A Study of the British Board of Trade
(1912), and the influence of the British Treasury in Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of
the British Treasury: Colonial Administration in the Eighteenth Century (I960).
The effects of the Navigation Acts on the American colonies have given rise to
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