J. L. Bell
The Boston Bankruptcy That Led to the American Revolution
In early 1765, Boston’s business world was rocked with the news that Nathaniel Wheelwright could not pay all his debts. His promissory notes had been treated as virtual currency in the colony, and over the next several months many more people, from a Boston selectman to the mother of Dr. Joseph Warren,were forced into bankruptcy.
This talk looks at the roots of that crisis in British imperial policy and family dynamics, and at its ripple effects in the Revolutionary period.
[Recorded March 08, 2014.]
J. L. Bell is the proprietor of the Boston 1775 website (boston1775.blogspot.com), providing daily helpings of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about Revolutionary New England. He is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, a book-length study for the National Park Service about General George Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and numerous articles and book chapters.
