William Petty in Boston: Political Economy, Religion, and Money in Provincial New England

Transformations in Puritan ideas about God's rule in the world, or Providence, spurred the reception of formal economic theories in New England from 1680 through the 1720s. English political economists such as William Petty and Charles Davenant critiqued customary notions of money and credit as they promoted England's competition with European powers. New Englanders turned to these thinkers to inform provincial monetary policy. They imported political economy through serial accounts of parliamentary debates about the Bank of England, the South Sea Bubble, and trade policies, as well as through merchant handbooks and literary accounts of merchants. Religious convictions informed this receptivity. Boston clergy such as Cotton Mather and civic leaders such as Samuel Sewall understood the British Empire to be a bulwark against Catholic hegemony. Taking the works of Petty and Davenant to be descriptions of an economic order that abetted Protestant empire, they reshaped Puritan moral convictions. Once hostile to treating credit as a commodity and money as a fungible good, they embraced the latest techniques for exchanging credit and abandoned prohibitions against usury. In this sense, changes in Puritan theology were integral to the development of a market culture in provincial New England.