Revisiting Colonial Massachusetts and Mises’s Taxonomy of Money

In economic science, as with any science, appropriate, accurate, and precise terminology is essential, but there are often challenges to fitting real phenomena into established categories. In a previous article, “Massachusetts 1690: The First Western Fiat Experiment,” I examined the first experiment with government-issued bills of credit. This article answers the following question: according to Mises’s taxonomy of money, where do the bills of credit of colonial Massachusetts fit?