The Massachusetts currency of 1690 was the first inconvertible paper money to be supported solely by a legal tender law. The circumstances that led to its creation exceed the typical story of wartime specie shortage. Due to temporary political constraints of that turbulent period, the currency...

"The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued fiat paper money as their principal internal medium of exchange. This system arose piecemeal across the colonies making the paper money creation story for each colony unique. It was true monetary...

Re-coinage implies that old coins are declared invalid and exchanged for new ones at fixed exchange rates and dates. Empirical evidence shows that re-coinage could occur as often as twice a year within a currency area in the Middle Ages. The exchange fee at re-coinage worked as a monetary tax...

Money, in this paper, is defined as a power relationship of a specific kind, a stratified social debt relationship, measured in a unit of account determined by some authority. A brief historical examination reveals its evolving nature in the process of social provisioning. Money not only...