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.
