The Blood That Nourishes the Body Politic: The Origins of Paper Money in Early America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1690 the government of Massachusetts created the first paper money in the Western world to pay for the unsuccessful invasion of Canada at the opening of King William’s War. So-called bills of public credit were based on radical ideas about money and value that had emerged in England during the Commonwealth and spread to the colonies shortly thereafter, where they were widely implemented in the first half of the eighteenth century. Far from being a neutral medium, paper money was inseparable from colonial politics; its value came from public faith in provincial legislatures to accept the money as payment for taxes. Moreover, it expressed the legislative prerogative to make war, define markets, and, with the establishment of the first public land banks in the 1710s, stimulate commerce. This essay explores the origins of paper money in early America and argues that it became the basis of a colonial political economic order founded on the legislative authority to make such money as well as a notion of value that tied local monetary worth to a colony’s collective political and economic future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".