Inflation and Controls, Pennsylvania, 1774–1779

Extract

In attempting to fit a phase of the American Revolutionary era into this program on economic unrest, I am not concerned with the factors leading up to the conflict. Historians have traced these in the evolution of the colonies, in changes in Great Britain and, for that matter, in much of Europe, over the long years of peace as well as in the era of controversy. They are complex factors in which thought, whether social, political, or economic, may be far removed from the action that it influences. My concern is with the economic setting in Pennsylvania at the end of the decade of protest and with the rapid changes in price relationships in the early war years which made for unrest within a period of unrest.