A small but sharp-minded group of scholars attempt to declutter the field of modern economic history with a determined focus on monetary theory and practice. Setting aside other issues – agricultural and technological innovation, imperial agendas, commercial expansion, balance of trade, labor practices, prices and wages, consumer tastes, changes in religious perspective, and transformation of moral sentiments – they look to what they see as the heart of matter: money. Or, Dror Goldberg alerts us up front in this book, the real story concerns the displacement of some forms of money (coins, private notes, or bills – all convertible to goods or precious metals) with legal tender currency (government printed notes, sanctioned by law as a form of transferable credit). We have come to think of such currency as real money. That, Goldberg maintains, was a revolution. And it took place in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 14, 1690, when the Massachusetts government passed a new currency law that created a new form of legal tender. The culmination of this revolution occurred in 1971 when the United States government no longer pegged the value of the currency to a set amount of gold.

The purpose of Easy Money is to describe this revolution and, perhaps more intriguingly, to explain why it took place in Boston, rather than in Amsterdam or London. Drawing on Massachusetts letters, court records, and laws from the 1680s and 1690s, and with due reference to the relevant secondary literature, Goldberg offers four developments in the transatlantic political context, and a handful of religious and moral factors. The political reasons dominate the account. Most importantly, in 1690, Massachusetts joined England’s war against France and began a period of military conflict in Acadia, which created an urgent need for tax income to pay soldiers. Legal tender currency facilitated the payment of such taxes: such currency was issued to soldiers as pay, who subsequently put it into circulation. It was then used by the holders of such currency to pay taxes whenever the government demanded it.

In addition, following the Revolution of 1688, constitutional changes in London opened up possibilities for currency reform. Massachusetts had the relative freedom to innovate on existing currency laws, and religious turmoil in England loosened traditional restraints on the move from gold-based currency to credit-based paper notes. The result was that Massachusetts developed the means to secure a steady tax income for its military needs.

To this extent, Goldberg describes the political conditions that allowed for the development of legal tender currency rather than its ideological roots. Religion is added to the mix as an ideological explanation. Puritan leaders such as Cotton Mather reflected a number of mindsets and sensibilities that prompted new currency laws. These included an intellectual focus on monetary matters, which led to an exceptional acumen about such matters. They also involved a theological tendency to emphasize the spiritual over the material – and therefore the viability of a currency detached from precious metals. In addition, Goldberg lists in quick order an exposure to European-wide and Canadian small-scale experimentation with legal tender, a non-conformist mentalité, a risk-taking moral outlook, optimism, and prudential judgment. The account here is somewhat cursory and suggestive rather than fully elucidated, and Goldberg never comes to terms with the apparent contradictions among the various traits that are supposedly derived from Puritan culture. One has the sense that Goldberg is describing a personality very close to what Max Weber labeled as the Protestant ethic and to what Robert K. Merton explained as the Puritan readiness to embrace modern science and support England’s nascent Royal Society.

Goldberg’s argument is shaped to a critique of long-standing interpretations of Massachusetts currency that deemphasize the revolutionary nature of the 1690 currency law. During the 1920s, Andrew McFarland Davis’s detailed studies suggested that the eventual turn to government-printed notes in Massachusetts came as the result of three decades of debate and piecemeal legal changes: a pragmatic and somewhat slow, bit-by-bit evolution. More recently, Christian Desan argued that the real innovations in money came in England, not New England. Goldberg puts the focus back on New England as the seedbed of modern American monetary policy. In the process, he attempts to recover what he argues was the signal importance of the 1690 law and the adjustments made to it over the subsequent 2 years.

In sum, Goldberg argues that Puritan Massachusetts created one of the most modernizing monetary policies in the western world. The religious dimension of this argument is uneven and quite secondary to the political dimensions. In the end, Goldberg gives pragmatic reasons for the move to legal tender. One could question his insistence on the revolutionary nature of monetary changes that were decreed in Massachusetts, especially given the fact that its currency policy had to be revised repeatedly during the 1720s through the 1750s. Nonetheless, this is a provocative book that causes us to rethink the relation among monetary policy, economic development, and religion in colonial New England.