Under these commercial circumstances borrowing among the colonists increased dramatically, as farmers and traders incurred debts in order to buy more land and livestock or to finance projects that they expected would increase their profits. This borrowing against future earnings was not the same as the informal “book debts” of the small rural communities where people knew one another, were implicated in one another’s lives, and did not demand interest on their debts. Much of the new commercial borrowing involved formal, signed interest-bearing instruments of credit often between people who did
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