Keywords
Colonial history
Currency
Recoinage
Debasement
How to Cite
Abstract
The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of major transformations in the colonial economies.The monetary system was not an exception. This paper contributes to the analysis of such variations, examining two aspects of the monetary policy of the Bourbons: the debasement and the recoinage. For this, the currency amounts that agents took to the Nueva Granada mints to be reminted were reconstructed and the incentives that the Crown provided for that operation were analyzed. The results show that both measures altered the composition but not the size of the money supply. Thus, although the new coinage reduced transaction costs, the debasement prevented the currency in circulation to get unified. It was also found that the circulation of silver coins was important despite of the fact that the viceroyalty was a gold-producing economy. Finally, it is argued that both measures affected in different ways the behavior of variables such as inflation, low-denomination coins and the Gresham's law.The journal Memoria y Sociedad is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.