How American colonists laid the foundations of American capitalism with an economy built on credit

Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation examines how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial and founding eras of the republic.

In this major new history of early America, Claire Priest describes how the British Parliament departed from the customary ways that English law protected land and inheritance, enacting laws for the colonies that privileged creditors by defining land and slaves as commodities available to satisfy debts. Colonial governments, in turn, created local legal institutions that enabled people to further leverage their assets to obtain credit. Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and that increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America.

Credit Nation presents a new vision of American economic history, one where credit markets and liquidity were prioritized from the outset, where property rights and slaves became commodities for creditors' claims, and where legal institutions played a critical role in the Stamp Act crisis and other political episodes of the founding period.

About the Author
Claire Priest is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Twitter @priest_claire

Reviews
"An informative and deeply researched book that explores how property law influenced the development of the English colonies and, ultimately, the United States."---Aaron L. Chin, H-Early-America



Book Information
ISBN 9780691241722
Author Claire Priest
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press