Making Change: Money, Wealth, and Sovereignty in Hispanic America, 1750-1850

FAIN: FT-270527-20

Andrew Konove
University of Texas, San Antonio (San Antonio, TX 78249-1644)

Research leading to a book on the history of money in Spanish America during the Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850.

This project offers a new interpretation of the Age of Revolutions in Hispanic America by examining the role of money and monetary reform in the era of Spanish American independence. It follows eighteenth-century reformers’ attempts to introduce fractional currency, or small change, in colonial Spanish America in order to promote commerce and alleviate poverty. It traces those efforts through the wars for independence, when patriot and royalist armies and the new American nation-states experimented with different forms of money in order to build popular support and raise revenue for their regimes. Using published treatises of political economy, archival petitions to royal and national authorities, judicial records, and newspapers, my book project shows that Hispanic Americans saw money and monetary policy as drivers of economic development and nation building. Making Change thus reinserts the history of economic ideas into the historiography of Latin America’s independence era.