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In The Currency of Empire, Jonathan Barth explores the intersection of money and power in the early years of North American history, and he shows how the control of money informed English imperial action overseas. The export-oriented mercantile economy promoted by the English Crown, Barth argues, directed the plan for colonization, the regulation of colonial commerce, and the politics of empire. The imperial project required an orderly flow of gold and silver, and thus England's colonial regime required stringent monetary regulation. As Barth shows, money was also a flash point for resistance; many colonists acutely resented their subordinate economic station, desiring for their local economies a robust, secure, and uniform money supply. This placed them immediately at odds with the mercantilist laws of the empire and precipitated an imperial crisis in the 1670s, a full century before the Declaration of Independence. The Currency of Empire examines what were a series of explosive political conflicts in the seventeenth century and demonstrates how the struggle over monetary policy prefigured the patriot reaction to the Stamp Act and so-called Intolerable Acts on the eve of American independence. Thanks to generous funding from the Arizona State University and George Mason University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Barrington Moore, Jr., one of the most distinguished thinkers in critical theory and historical sociology, was long concerned with the prospects for freedom and decency in industrial society. The product of decades of reflection on issues of authority, inequality, and injustice, this volume analyzes fluctuating moral beliefs and behavior in political and economic affairs at different points in history, from the early Middle Ages in England to the prospects for liberalism under twentieth-century Soviet socialism. The social sources of antisocial behavior; principles of social inequality; and the origins, enemies, and possibilities of rational discussion in public affairs—these are among the topics Moore considers as he seeks to uncover the historical causes of some accepted forms of morality and to assess their social consequences. The keynote essay examines how moral codes grew out of commercial practices in England from medieval times through the industrial revolution. Moore pays special attention to conceptions of honesty and the temptation to evade that inform the volume as a whole. In the other essays, he considers particular political issues, viewing "political" in its broadest sense as an unequal distribution of power and authority that carries a strong moral charge. Free of preaching and advocacy, his work offers a rare reasonable assessment of the morality of major social institutions over time.