The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865

Chapter 2 ─  ─ The World in a Shilling Building the City-State’s Political Economy The end of Coyning mony within this Commonwealth is for the more easy managing the traficque thereof within itself, & not Indended to make returnes to other Countrjes. —Massachusetts General Court, 1654 By virtue of its royal charter, the Massachusetts Bay Company appeared to be the creature of England’s King Charles, much as Philippi had been the creature of King Philip of Macedon. But in its first two decades, Boston did not behave like the king’s pet. In fact, the Crown tried to revoke the charter in the first decade because the new colony frequently acted as though it were an independent state, treating the charter as a malleable set of guidelines, open to interpretation by the governor and General Court.1 By means of these free interpretations, the colony exceeded the charter ’s limits in many ways. The churches developed an organizational structure where each church gathered its own members and chose its own minister, contradictory to the hierarchical Church of England . The colony created incorporated townships and granted them colony lands (a usurpation of the Crown’s power to create corporations ), and created Harvard College in 1636 as a chartered corporation as well. The General Court, originally designed as a governor and his “assistants” to guide the company, expanded itself to include a house of deputies chosen to represent the freemen in the newly formed towns. And together with Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, Massachusetts formed the United Colonies as an alliance for mutual defense. 86 chapter 2 All these actions generated arguments on both sides of the Atlantic about whether the commonwealth was a “perfect res publica” or a “free state.” But nothing that Massachusetts did was quite as state-like as the creation of an independent circulating currency.2 By issuing its own coins, Boston openly assumed the Crown’s prerogative , and it used the economic power, trust, and credit that the coinage accrued to advance its own vision of political economy across the New England region and among the competing powers of the Atlantic world. This chapter explores Boston’s role in developing and integrating New England’s internal economy as well as the political consequences of these events, especially with respect to the colonists’ relationship with New England’s indigenous peoples. To do so, it takes a close look at Massachusetts’ silver shillings, examining both the productive and destructive sides of these coins. This currency played a critical role in assuring the city-state of Boston’s autonomy, and developing a stable, prosperous, and growing economy for the colonists who spread rapidly across the New England region, while providing the colony with the financial strength to overpower indigenous resistance to this expansion. Scholarship on the political economy of early America tends to focus on the era of the American Revolution, when the British Empire’s taxation reforms engendered violent colonial protests, and the independent United States struggled to shape its own economic future. The colonies’ development in the two centuries before 1776 is often treated simply as background for the revolution, as though North America had a brief political economy moment in the late eighteenth century, but before that, a long period of preparatory, apolitical economics.3 By contrast, the subject of political economy has a rich literature focused on the early modern British Empire, but its perspective tends to be distinctly metropolitan. The British homelands, usually England (and sometimes Scotland), constitute the polity whose economy the rest of the empire serves. The evolution of mercantilist doctrines that linked colonies to the metropolis, beginning with the Navigation Acts of 1651, takes center stage in these accounts. From the metropolitan viewpoint, the economic development of the colonies becomes the story of successes and fail- [150.230.61.141] Project MUSE (2024-11-27 19:48 GMT) the world in a shilling 87 ures in the production of commodities within a system run by London and Westminster, with variations suitable to the climates and conditions of the different colonial regions, but with little attention to the political ambitions of individual colonies.4 My aim here is different. By highlighting its capacity to act independently , this chapter concentrates on the political economy of the city-state of Boston itself. Rather than considering it as merely a subsidiary of England’s empire, I proceed from the premise that Boston was for Boston—that it behaved as an autonomous entity pursuing its own political economy...