Watchful Guardians of Liberty : The French Revolution and the Development of Democratic-Republicanism in Philadelphia, 1792-1797

In 1792 the stakes of political discussion in Philadelphia began to change. According to the General Advertiser, The question in America is no longer between federalism and anti-federalism but between republicanism and anti-republicanism. Unlike the political struggles between those for and against the Constitution, the debate had shifted to something more fundamental: the survival of the republican experiment itself. Although no American likely would have described himself as anti-republican -- effectively an enemy of the United States\u27 very existence and founding principles -- the editorial implicitly asserted that there existed in America the seeds of a monarchical party. These republicans feared most the irresistible propensity of all governors to slide into despotism, and were deeply concerned by what they perceived as Congress and the president taking an increasingly broad interpretation of their powers under the Constitution

The Political Economy of Silver Money in England, 1542-1696

This dissertation investigates the myriad intellectual, economic, political, and cultural forces that shaped the development of English monetary policy between the Great Debasement of the 1540s and the Great Recoinage of the 1690s. It argues that a distinct school of English political economy originated in the second half of the sixteenth century as a series of open-ended investigations into the relationship between the money supply and prices that began the aftermath of monetary crisis and continued in the face of mounting fiscal pressures upon the state. The process focused attention on the constituent materials of hard currency. The political economy of commodity money accounted for the various physical forms in which these metals occurred and the ways in which gold, silver, and the value they represented circulated. The dissertation answers recent calls by revisionist historians of money to study currencies with an eye to the knowledge-making practices and cultural assumptions that state actors bring to bear on monetary design and policy. To do so, it proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of early modern commodity money that bridges the historiographies of the fiscal state, science and technology, political economy, and literature. It sheds light on the enormous complexity of England’s bimetallic monetary system and the ways that the state and its administrators attempted to understand and manage that complexity