Money in Motion: Circulation in Early Modern Science, Political Economy, and Debates Over Currency and Banking

Circulation was to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what evolution was to the nineteenth and twentieth, an explanatory framework for a wide range of early modern science and social thought. This talk will explore the foundational importance of circulation as a master model for modern economic discourse, by examining the ways in which it set the stakes of social struggle over the rise of banking and paper money in England and its American colonies.