"Capital and Credit with Approved Security": Financial Markets in Montserrat and South Carolina, 1748-1775

In the last three decades, economic, business, and social historians have been striving to understand whether America was economically independent from Britain, particularly whether it was able to revolt by 1776 because it was no longer inextricably tied to the mother country, by bonds of indebtedness, for the satisfaction of its agricultural, commercial, and manufactured n eds [McCusker and Menard, 1986]1. Scholars have described and explained America's condition in a variety of ways, the most intriguing of which are those that focus on the development of colonies, the emergence of discrete independent regions within colonies, and the extent to which the parts of the colonies were bound together [Rothenberg, 1985; Brooke, 1989; Beeman, 1984]. Capital accumulation was critical to this colonial evolution, and specific information on the sources and destinations of colonial capital helps us form tentative conclusions about he financial independence of eighteenth-century America. For no plantation economy is there a detailed historical study of the role that the flow of capital and credit played in its development. There is no examination of the geographical sources and destinations of capital and credit, the linkages between capital and countryside, and the complicated, interwoven, financial relationships that held a colony together and to its mother country. Particularly well suited to such an analysis are the situations of two of these economies -those of an older and stagnant Montserrat, and a