"Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be"?: The Experience of Credit and Debt in the English Atlantic World, 1660-1720

This project investigates the on-the-ground production of the rules and networks of credit exchange in the colonies of Pennsylvania and Jamaica between the Restoration and the Seven Years' War. Building on new theories of emergence, Hicklin argues that it was the long-distance and longer-term nature of Atlantic credit exchange that altered traditional debt relations. Further, the increasingly distant credit relations brought questions of risk, uncertainty, and the politics of political economy to the fore. This study, in its focus on intra- and inter-colonial borrowing and lending deprivileges London as the center for commercial change.  What had been a regionally, economically, and socially variant system at the time of the Restoration became a largely unified credit economy by the time of the Seven Years' War through a process of evolution more than revolution.