“The dearness of every thing,” wrote philosopher and historian David Hume, “from plenty of money, is a disadvantage, which attends to an established commerce, and sets bounds to it in every country, by enabling the poorer states to undersell the richer in all foreign markets.” New forms of money were prompting anxiety:

The monetary economy

Many of David Hume’s compatriots shared his skepticism of banks, paper money, and credit, though few identified them so strongly with inflation. Those antiquarians who concerned themselves with long-term price trends more often focused their attention on the debasement of the coinage. Hume was one of the few to notice the importance of “paper money” and credit to the growth of the eighteenth-century economy. While few contemporaries would disagree with the notion that they were living in an era of rapid economic and social change, the tendency of modern historians to emphasize that change rather than the continuities with earlier periods obscures the reality that many of the salient features of the eighteenth-century economy had roots that stretched back to the Middle Ages.