Mara Caden is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, and an affiliate of the Department of History. Caden is a historian of economic life in early modern Britain and in the worlds of European empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with interests in manufacturing, money, free and unfree labor, and the experience of work.
Caden’s book manuscript, Mint Conditions: The Politics of Money in Britain and its Empire 1650-1760, links the politics of manufacturing in an industrializing empire with formal and informal techniques of monetary management. The book explains what monetary policy has to do with the shape and structure of Britain’s early modern empire, and shows how a given currency scene determines what labor relationships are possible, fostering or inhibiting economic activities from pin-making to plantation monoculture. In the book, Caden rewrites the history of the “Great Recoinage,” an English monetary project that is normally described as a misguided failure, as a successful project that instilled popular domestic and international trust in England’s silver currency through a combination of standardized mechanical production and a highly centralized management structure. This monetary reform, Caden argues, stimulated manufacturing and export trades in England and made it possible to operate a national bank, finance a permanent public debt, fund increasingly expensive wars, and operate sophisticated financial instruments. As such, this book contends that “hard” and “soft” money are inherently entwined and mutually supporting, rather than competing with one another. But if this much-maligned project helped metropolitan England expand its military power, imperial reach, and commercial wealth, it had the opposite effect on Britain’s overseas territories. Against constant colonial efforts to establish mints or wrest control of monetary flows, Britain’s central control of a uniform currency rendered North American, Caribbean, and Irish territories chronically short of coin or other alternative means of payment, which made wage labor and internal trade impractical. If we want to understand the development trajectories of colonial and post-colonial regions, Caden’s book suggests that we must consider the monetary infrastructures in place, and that we take the historical actors’ politically charged rhetoric about currency design seriously.
Caden received her PhD in Early Modern European History from Yale University. Before coming to the University of Chicago, she held an NEH research fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Richmond. At the University of Chicago, she teaches the “Power, Identity, and Resistance” sequence in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.
Link:
Mara Caden, “Money and its Technologies: Industrial Opposition and the Problem of Trust,” in A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment, Christine Desan, ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474206822.ch-001