Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COINE (Counterfeiting Empire: Money, Crime, and Politics in the British Atlantic World)
Período documentado: 2018-09-01 hasta 2020-08-31
COINE asks how counterfeiters and the fake money they made fundamentally shaped commerce and politics in the eighteenth century. Between 1700-1800, experimentation and a lack of standardization characterized the money supply, and these qualities facilitated endemic counterfeiting. Counterfeiters took advantage of an increasingly connected world to engage in an early form of organized crime. Their actions occupied officials on both sides of the Atlantic, who treated counterfeiting as a crime of the highest order: counterfeiting was typically classed as high treason and punishable by death. COINE maps counterfeiters’ operations using emergent digital methods. It’s the first project to conceptualize counterfeiting as an imperial crime that had wide-ranging implications for market development, cultures of money, and imperial authority in the 18th-century British Atlantic world.
COINE makes an important intervention given the rapidly changing monetary landscape of the twenty-first century. Counterfeiting took on particular urgency in the 18th century as Western governments experimented with new forms of money. Monetary innovations and concurrent concerns about counterfeiting led to debates about what money fundamentally was, from whence its value came, and what role the government should play in regulating it. These historical debates resonate deeply with and provide essential context for contemporary discussions and concerns about new, digital forms of currency that lack government backing and are based on alternate systems of value that seem illusory or difficult to understand for the general population. And it was in the 18th century that most European governments first began to envision a world where money would be yoked to sovereignty—where, for instance, only British money would circulate within British borders. Understanding the emergence of territorial currencies, and how concerns about counterfeiting contributed to their emergence, provides depth and dimension to contemporary debates about the future of territorial currencies, the efficacy of currency unions, and the benefits and drawbacks of non-state backed currencies or a post-cash world.
COINE’s objectives include identifying the scope of counterfeiting in the period; tracing the impact of counterfeiting on economic integration, monetary innovation, penal code standardization and policy decisions; understanding how the presence of counterfeits and an unstandardized money supply shaped daily economic exchange and market development; providing an interpretive account of money as historically and culturally specific medium; and disseminating findings in academia through publications, in conference presentations and in general talks.
COINE makes an important intervention given the rapidly changing monetary landscape of the twenty-first century. Counterfeiting took on particular urgency in the 18th century as Western governments experimented with new forms of money. Monetary innovations and concurrent concerns about counterfeiting led to debates about what money fundamentally was, from whence its value came, and what role the government should play in regulating it. These historical debates resonate deeply with and provide essential context for contemporary discussions and concerns about new, digital forms of currency that lack government backing and are based on alternate systems of value that seem illusory or difficult to understand for the general population. And it was in the 18th century that most European governments first began to envision a world where money would be yoked to sovereignty—where, for instance, only British money would circulate within British borders. Understanding the emergence of territorial currencies, and how concerns about counterfeiting contributed to their emergence, provides depth and dimension to contemporary debates about the future of territorial currencies, the efficacy of currency unions, and the benefits and drawbacks of non-state backed currencies or a post-cash world.
COINE’s objectives include identifying the scope of counterfeiting in the period; tracing the impact of counterfeiting on economic integration, monetary innovation, penal code standardization and policy decisions; understanding how the presence of counterfeits and an unstandardized money supply shaped daily economic exchange and market development; providing an interpretive account of money as historically and culturally specific medium; and disseminating findings in academia through publications, in conference presentations and in general talks.
Work for COINE was divided into four work packages (WPs), performed as follows. WP 1 consisted of compilation of data on British-based counterfeiters. The researcher gathered data on Yorkshire-based counterfeiters, focusing especially on a well-document internationally-operating group in the 1760s, and also completed research work in Australia investigating British counterfeiters who were transported after conviction to add a further international dimension to the project. Additional research was also undertaken in archives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. WP 2 focused on the identification and analysis of counterfeiting patterns. The researcher built a purpose-built database to collect diverse documentary sources to uncover how counterfeiters operated in the eighteenth century. Counterfeiters were often marginal members of society who leave few historical records. The database assists in building a picture of their individual lives and the connections they made. As part of this work package, the researcher attended the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School in July 2019 to investigate other digital tools to assist in this work. WP 3 involved working closely with existing monetary media, with newspaper notices describing counterfeits, and with individual’s accounts of encountering counterfeits (usually in court testimony) to understand how counterfeits affected daily economic transactions. This work has been completed and portions of the analysis were presented at the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre. WP 4 focused on dissemination. Research findings from this project have been presented at a Capitalism and the American Revolution workshop, organised and hosted by the researcher and her supervisor at the University of Birmingham, at the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre, and at the British Association for American Studies annual meeting, a large interdisciplinary conference. A single-authored article is in preparation, arising from the Capitalism and the American Revolution workshop, as is a co-edited volume. The researcher is currently completing her single-authored book manuscript based on her findings, which will be submitted for review to a university press in Summer 2021.
The researcher’s finding have broadly found that the scale of counterfeiting and its political significance has been dramatically underestimated by scholars to date; that counterfeiting was a force for economic integration and legal standardization in this period; that ordinary people, far from accepting official ideas that money’s value came from either being made from precious metals or from having the monarch’s stamp, often endorsed an idea of money that was flexible, even modern.
The researcher’s finding have broadly found that the scale of counterfeiting and its political significance has been dramatically underestimated by scholars to date; that counterfeiting was a force for economic integration and legal standardization in this period; that ordinary people, far from accepting official ideas that money’s value came from either being made from precious metals or from having the monarch’s stamp, often endorsed an idea of money that was flexible, even modern.
Existing scholarship has emphasized that money is not an ahistorical, neutral medium, but rather politically and culturally constructed. This scholarship has focused on economic institutions or moments of monetary innovation or rupture. Other scholars have investigated the intimate links between clandestine and illegal trade and economic development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In studies of everything from peddling to smuggling and piracy, scholars have argued that ‘rogue colonialism’ paved the way for economic growth and state formation in the Americas. Counterfeiting has been absent from both the new history of money and the history of illegal economies in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, even as scholars of nineteenth-century America have acknowledged its importance to politics and the development of capitalism. Furthermore, scholars who have looked at counterfeiting in the eighteenth-century have treated it largely as a localized crime with little long-term cultural and political significance. COINE has reframed a previously understudied crime, counterfeiting, as a significant feature of the eighteenth-century imperial economy, about which policy makers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic cared deeply. It has revealed how counterfeits shaped people’s handling and understanding of money in ordinary economic transactions in the age before the dominance of standardized, territorial currencies. And it has used counterfeiting to go beyond elite texts to understand the range of ideas about money and value in this period. Long before the modern rejection of commodity money—that is, money made of material deemed inherently valuable—everyday people could demonstrate comfort with money with value that derived instead from state authority or widespread community acceptance. These findings, once published, have deep resonance with modern debates about the changing landscape of money, ranging from the demise of cash to the rise of crypto-currenices.