Multitude of Monies: Merchants, Welfare Institutions and Monetary Systems in the Spanish Empire and Sweden, 1780-1840

This project uses a global historical perspective to examine how leading economic actors in the Spanish Empire and Sweden managed monetary diversity between 1780 and 1840. This was a period when many states introduced a range of monetary measures, such as paper money, to increase available resources. Previous research has interpreted monetary diversity as a problem that created uncertainty, instability and segmented markets, but scholars have not examined how different actors assessed the different financial instruments, carried out transactions and preserved economic value. By analyzing activities at the micro level, we increase our knowledge about how monetary systems functioned in practice.