David Center for the American Revolution Seminar “The Triumph of Bank Time in the Early Republic” with Justin Clark

The first 2024-2025 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place September 25, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.

The speaker will be Dr. Justin Clark. Clark is Senior Lecturer in the History Department at Cornell University. He was previously Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). His first book, City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. He is currently editing A Cultural History of Time in the Age of Empire and Industry (1789 - 1914) (Bloomsbury 2026) and writing A Clockwork Republic (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press), from which this paper is drawn.

Clark will be presenting his paper titled: "The Post-Revolutionary Credit Crisis and the Triumph of Market Time” A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.

To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Brenna Holland, Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, at [email protected].

NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.

“The Triumph of Bank Time in the Early Republic”

Historians have long believed that Americans relinquished more “natural” forms of time consciousness only with the industrial developments of the antebellum period: mass-produced clocks and watches, railroad timetables, and growing reliance on factory wage labor. Yet as this paper argues, rural republicans had already developed a more modern and abstract understanding of time by the 1790s.

Throughout the eighteenth century, an intermediate network of coastal merchants, wholesalers, and village shopkeepers connected manufacturers in the British Isles with rural producers in the colonies. By quietly pricing interest – the time value of money -- into the cost of goods, inland shopkeepers protected the rural customer who paid by the harvest with the Liverpool merchant who charged interest by the day. The accommodation between these two financial cultures collapsed with the Revolution, as an examination of account books, commercial correspondence, newspapers, and other sources shows. After 1783, as a condition for renewing commerce with their newly independent American counterparts, British merchants demanded the swift repayment of old debts with interest. These demands quickly travelled down the chain of debt from coastal importer to villager, such that rural debtors found themselves dragged not only into court, learning in the process what Franklin’s urban artisans already knew: “Time is money.” As one agricultural journal urged in 1799, ““every minute thou hast ever spent in consulting Almanacks for the weather, has been entirely lost, or very foolishly employed”; time was better spent watching the financial calendar. Long before the appearance of the steamboat, train, village clock or factory, these brushes with the law reshaped rural time consciousness. Ultimately, this paper argues, impersonal and inflexible demands for punctuality played an overlooked but significant role in contemporary episodes of agrarian resistance such as Shays’ Rebellion.