Colonial law scholars of the last several generations have characterized colonial law and its development as emerging in response to endogenous cultural belief systems and values or, more recently, as in a process of progressive modernization corresponding to economic growth and commercialization. Claire Priest's paper presents a new interpretation of colonial legal development which focuses on the impact of government paper money experiments in prescribing the conditions under which individuals contracted and litigated in the colonial period. Colonial contractual obligations and debt litigation are more appropriately understood as reflecting an economic revolution from a society based principally on barter relations to a more modern cash economy. Greater availability of currency allowed market specialization and vastly increased colonists' ability to enter contractual relations beyond their local communities, but it also led to an unprecedented government power to affect the value of credit agreements through fiscal and monetary policies. In colonial New England, the struggles over monetary policy both within colonial legislatures and between colonial legislatures and the English Parliament and Board of Trade led to highly unstable currency policies causing repeated currency crises and periods of- total reversion to barter. During these periods, the colonial courts were swamped with litigation initiated by creditors attempting to either minimize losses or to opportunistically profit from fluctuations in market conditions. Debtors also chose between performance and default based on their ability to pay--often determined by economic conditions--and changes in the value of damage awards driven by currency fluctuations. A focus on currency policies and their effects reveals that even quintessentially local forms of obligations, such as book account debts, were affected by sources of authority as removed as Parliament The "law" of colonial contractual relations was as much generated by power Struggles between the colonies and England, political controversies within colonial legislatures, currency fluctuations and market instability, as it was the product Of individual promises and common law rules.