Claire Priest

Currency Policies and Legal Development in Colonial New England

I. THE EFFECTS OF CURRENCY SCARCITY ON MARKETS AND TH E L A W ........................................................................................... 13 17 A. Barter, the Cost of Transacting, and Market Development ....... 1318 B. Public and Private Responses to Currency Scarcity in Colonial Massachusetts Prior to the Issuance of P ublic C urrency ......................................................................... 1321 C. Colonial Judicial Remedies Before Widespread Public Currency Circulation ................................................................. 1332 D. Assessing the Costs of Monetary Scarcity .................................. 1335 1. The Limitations of Money Substitutes .................................. 1335 2. Economics Scholarship on Colonial Economic Growth ...... 1339

The End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in the American Revolutionary Period

For historians and property law scholars, the abolition of the fee tail estate in land by many states during the American Revolutionary Period serves as a principal symbol of the power of republican ideology during the Founding Era. Political leaders of the Founding Era deplored the system of hereditary privilege that defined the European aristocratic political order. Property served as the foundation of that order: political, economic, and social privileges were associated with ownership of landed estates. Property and inheritance law enabled families to retain land, and, therefore, the privileges associated with landed estates, over the generations. Therefore, American historians celebrate the abolition of the fee tail estate and primogeniture by some states as a practical and tangible achievement of the Republican Revolution.