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The Land-Bank System in the American Colonies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Theodore Thayer
Theodore Thayer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

One need not be very conversant with modern money, credit, and banking to find in them a kinship with the land banks of the Colonial era. In a manner suggestive of our Federal Reserve System, the Colonial land banks exerted a wide influence over the economic life of the times. Indeed, the functions of the land-bank system embraced every phase of the Colonial economy. Its history to a large degree comprises the history of currency, money values, inflation, credit, public finance, and economic development in eighteenth-century America.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Spring 1953 , pp. 145 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1953

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References

1 O'Callaghan, E. B. (ed.), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany: Weed. Parsons and Company, Printers, 1855), V, 494, 514, 737–38Google Scholar.

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7 See the statutes at large of the various colonies for the land-bank laws.

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21 Ibid. LXII, 133–48; LXIII, 118; LXIV, 242–50.

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26 Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, VI, 116.

27 Ibid.

28 See Norris Papers, Loan Office Accounts. HSP.

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30 Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, VII, 204.

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