In the preface to their volume of essays, Daniel Carey and Christopher Finlay directly link its appearance with the ongoing financial and economic crisis, in which they discern an ‘integrated world of government debt, banking, taxation and trade’ (p. xiii) which came into being between 1688 and 1815. The introductory essay by Daniel Carey briefly surveys the financial histories of Britain, Ireland and America during this period, before concluding that this integrated world was ‘not only a practical, political and commercial achievement, but also a continual source of intellectual ferment and dispute’ (p. 16). It is this phenomenon that the essays in the volume, organised in three sections, explore.
The first section examines ‘political economy in Enlightenment Britain’, with three papers taking the story from Locke to the Scottish Enlightenment. Daniel Carey's chapter assesses John Locke's contribution to the Recoinage Crisis of 1695–6 in England, one of the first clashes between advocates of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ money to be fought out in the public arena. Carey argues that Locke's ‘hard money’ solution – to call in clipped specie and recoin it at face value, rather than devaluing it to match its bullion value – grew logically out of his political and philosophical views, in which economic considerations were secondary. On the same theme, Christopher Finlay's chapter examines David Hume's theory of money, demonstrating how he uneasily straddled two mutually contradictory positions. On the one hand Hume argued that all money was symbolic and enforced by government fiat, yet because this fiat could not be enforced at a supra-national level a bullion rather than paper currency was the only stable basis for commerce. The final essay, by Paul Tonks, examines a cadre of Scottish thinkers in the late eighteenth century. Rejecting Lockean arguments for minimal state intervention and a hard currency, these thinkers, like Hume, generally stressed the positive contribution made by the British state to the national economy, both in sustaining public credit and defending trade by military force. Although no more than brief forays into these wider themes, these essays work effectively, suggesting the centrality of such debates to economic and financial thought in the eighteenth century.
The next section, entitled ‘Change and exchange in the British Empire’, more closely fulfills the promise of the book's title to consider a (British) ‘empire of credit’, although unfortunately no mention is made here of the Indian experience.
Robin Hermann provides a detailed and convincingly argued discussion of the Royal African Company's experience in West Africa. Unable for political reasons to export gold from Britain, the Company therefore lacked the hard currency necessary for the African slave trade, and so lost out to competitors who did not suffer these constraints. He therefore provides an illuminating example of the direct connections between finance, currency, politics and economic success, though his paper glosses over the financial difficulties that the Company also experienced in the West Indies, where it frequently proved impossible to collect from plantation owners the money they owed. By contrast, Herman Wellenreuther delivers a broad, sweeping essay which argues that the American colonies were, in fact, economically independent by the mid-eighteenth century. Only in the final few pages do the financial implications of this argument emerge: economic independence meant that British efforts to regulate American currencies were at best an irrelevance, and at worst a source of grievance. Thus the essay has, in practice, little to do with credit, suggesting at best alternative contexts in which to understand the unstated operation of American finance and currency during this period. The third chapter, by Roger Fechner, examines John Witherspoon's 1786 essay on public credit. This might equally have been placed in the previous section, dealing as it does with certain aspects of the fiat and bullion currency debate. Fechner argues that Witherspoon came down on the hard money side and thereby helped to shape the financial structures and assumptions of the early American Republic, providing an example of how economic thought was translated into financial policy.
The final group of essays deal predominantly with the Irish experience of financial revolution during the eighteenth century, and are even more diverse in their focus. Ivar McGrath provides a characteristically detailed discussion of Irish government finances between 1716 and 1745, covering the emergence and early growth of a National Debt. His most interesting conclusion is its continued contingency and lack of permanence: not only was the fund for interest payments renewed biennially, but revenue surpluses would later enable the Irish government to redeem all but £5,700 of it between 1743 and 1759. By contrast, Sean Moore examines Irish credit from the bottom up rather than the top down, considering it as a form of ‘confessional coercion’. Church of Ireland clergymen extended credit to local Catholic peasantry, thereby imposing moral obligations upon them and aligning a conservative clerical ‘landed’ interest against a progressive ‘monied’ interest. Yet this does not carry as much conviction, since the line between clerical and lay landowners seems overdrawn, and Moore's distinction rests mainly on (hostile) literary critiques of Jonathan Swift's actions as a clergyman and creditor. C. George Caffentzis, author of an essay on the failure of George Berkeley's plans for a bank in the 1730s, similarly takes at face value Berkeley's conspiracy theories about the landed and monied interests who frustrated his plans. He perhaps also underplays how far Berkeley's views on hard money were intended to make a political, religious and moral – rather than economic – point. The same is true of Kevin Barry's discussion of Maria Edgeworth's novels, which places them in the context of the suspension of cash payments in Britain and Ireland after 1797 but perhaps overstates their interest in financial matters. He does show that they linked up with ongoing debates about gold and paper currencies, but his argument rests upon a very narrow range of literary mentions.
What contribution, then, do these essays, and this volume, make to the ‘integrated world’ identified by Carey and Finlay? As might be expected, no clear conclusion emerges from such a diverse and variegated group of essays. Yet many suggest fruitful avenues for future research, and a large number highlight the centrality of fiat and bullion currency to eighteenth-century economic thought and practice, as well as the unpredictable influence of intellectual, moral and political attitudes upon economic thought and vice versa.
Similar conclusions emerge from the other book under review, Carl Wennerlind's study of the intellectual underpinings of the English financial revolution between 1620 and 1720. It consists of six substantive but discrete chapters that examine quite narrowly focussed aspects of financial thought during this period. They are given only rather artificial unity by the notion that each involved ‘casualties of credit’, though other than the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic to support the commercial prospects of the South Sea Company it is difficult to identify any genuine ‘casualties’ in Wennerlind's book. Working almost exclusively from contemporary printed media, Wennerlind provides a series of detailed and well-drawn vignettes that illuminate certain important aspects of financial thought during this transformative period. Beginning in 1620, he first considers existing financial thought in England, based around traditional, neo-Aristotelian emphasis on the importance of money being composed of gold or silver and having intrinsic value, and thus its inherent scarcity. Moving to the 1650s, Wennerlind suggests that the intellectual circle around Samuel Hartlib developed the concept that money, and thus credit, was infinitely expandable through the use of paper currency that represented extrinsic rather than inherent value. This laid the intellectual foundations for the expansion of credit after 1660, kick-starting a financial revolution in England, although a further chapter shows how the acceptability of paper money was then enforced by draconian laws against coining and forgery. The two final chapters consider how public opinion was manipulated to uphold public credit between 1710 and 1720, as the revolution reached its mature phase.
Taken individually, these chapters are all of value, and some merit a wide circulation. The fifth, for example, examines the partisan discourses broadcast by Whig and Tory propagandists in 1710 at a moment of political and financial crisis. Drawing on Mark Knight's recent work, which showed how contemporary party-political contests generated rival truth-claims, Wennerlind applies this to the financial literature, suggesting that Whig and Tory propagandists produced competing interpretations of money, credit and the role of public opinion. He also suggests that this can be mapped roughly onto more fundamental divisions, between a generally ‘propertied’ Tory concern with intrinsic value and a generally ‘monied’ Whig concern with public opinion, where money was reduced to a token and therefore potentially limitless. This part is less convincing, given how much recent work has highlighted the absence of such clear-cut affinities. The fourth chapter, on how legal penalties were used to uphold public trust in paper currency, is a useful counterpart to Malcolm Gaskill's work on coining and popular mentalities, and shows how the state intervened to support the nascent financial revolution.
However, the comparatively narrow focus of these individual chapters forces Wennerlind to elide certain transitions. Although he makes a convincing case that the initial interest of the Hartlib circle in alchemy – with its potential to expand the money supply infinitely – gave way to a focus on paper currency which promised to do the same, the next step is not so secure. He does not generally consider how far beyond these texts such ideas circulated, or alternative sources of financial knowledge. Indeed, were such complex ideas necessary for financial structures to operate? In order to assert the novelty of the Hartlib circle, Wennerlind tends to downplay the importance of existing forms of credit, despite also citing Craig Muldrew's findings that trade or book credit was pervasive in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was, as he notes, of small scale, but its existence suggests that early modern England had already constructed a working model of credit, trust and popular opinion – as had the Dutch Republic, just across the North Sea. The formal treatises and pamphlets that Wennerlind analyses may have provided elites with an appropriate intellectual gloss, but he seems to overstate the decisive impact that they had in the crystallisation of wider popular opinion. Such works were probably not unimportant, but they formed only part of this wider phenomenon.
