More Mutual Banking Material

Shawn Wilbur's been very busy, apparently, these past few weeks. In a series of posts at The Very Idea!, the blog of his class in American intellectual history, he reproduces a lot of primary source material on Massachusetts' experiments with land banks in the 1680s and 1740s: " The Fund: A Boston Land Bank of 1681"; "1739-40: Prospectus of the Land Bank Company"; "1740: Dr. Wm. Douglas vs. the Land Bank"; "1740: A Defense of the Land Bank"; and "1741: Petition of London Merchants against the Land Bank." At In the Libertarian Labyrinth, he's also got links to a series of scholarly articles by Andrew McFarland Davis on eighteenth century experiments with land banks in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Also at In the Libertarian Labyrinth, in the meantime, he's posted William Cullen Bryant's essay "On Usury Laws," which seems to have influenced the section on usury laws in William Greene's Equality.

Speaking of which, finally, Shawn's got a cleaned up version of the latter work online. Here it is: Equality (1849), Greene's first major work on free banking.