As Anne Murphy states from the outset, her intention in this work is to redress an imbalance in the study of England's financial experience in the 1690s. Although the period has been the subject of much attention, this has generally been focused upon the first great expansion of the British state's formal national debt, the chartering of the Bank of England in 1694, or the experience of larger ‘blue chip’ joint-stock companies such as the East India, Royal African or Hudson's Bay Companies, as well as the Bank itself. Much less attention has been paid to the myriad other companies that entered the burgeoning English financial markets, and enjoyed varying degrees of success until the sharp crash of 1696 during the Great Recoinage. Murphy therefore aims to correct this imbalance by investigating patterns of behaviour by investors, and by studying the growth of secondary markets and the infrastructure that grew up around them.

The bulk of the chapters (1–3, 6–8) focus upon the nature of the market and its investors, making impressive use of the account books of Charles Blunt contained in the Chancery Masters Exhibits in the National Archives in Kew. Together with his copy of the transfer book of the Estcourt's Lead Mine Company, these allow a forensic reconstruction of the trading activities of one of these companies, as well as one of the new breed of stock-brokers or -jobbers who emerged in the 1690s. Some of these conclusions are not particularly favourable, showing that Blunt may have engaged in insider trading to inflate artificially the value of the company. By purchasing options while already holding large amounts of stock, Blunt and his confederates – including his cousin John Blunt of South Sea Bubble fame – could profit by driving up the value of the stocks, selling them at the higher value while using their pre-existing options to then repurchase the stocks at the lower price. As Murphy emphasises, these and other activities point to a high level of sophistication within the secondary markets, as well as a greater degree of popular participation than has been observed during the 1680s. Even traders such as Blunt, who combined stock-brokering with his former trade as an upholsterer, were capable of using options and futures to manage risk and exploit profits, both on his own behalf and that of others.

The picture that therefore emerges is of a secondary market which appears to have operated at two levels. A large number of stock-holders engaged in few trades, valuing mainly the security or dividends that share ownership offered, while a high volume of trades were conducted by a small coterie of professional or semi-professional stock-brokers or -jobbers. This offered the twin advantages of stability and liquidity: companies might have a stable ballast of long-term stock-holders who would only liquidate their holdings in the most dire circumstances, while retaining access to an active secondary market from which to draw credit. This two-track market would appear to have underpinned the efflorescence of English finance during the 1690s. The two middle chapters (4–5) of the book cover the infrastructure necessary to sustain this activity, mainly connected with the improved transmission of information both in London and elsewhere. Investment generated a demand for reliable information, to which companies – and the government itself as it attempted to raise money in these new markets – were forced to respond in order to succeed. Murphy therefore inverts North and Weingast's classic model of the state proactively generating trust through institutional reform; instead, such developments are seen as being in response to a much wider pressure for reliable information that swept up not only the government but other companies with it.

There is, however, one key area that appears to receive little mention in what is otherwise a rich and nuanced study, namely departmental government debts. These were not the tallies issued by the Treasury on funds such as the customs, excise or the land tax, which as Murphy states have been analysed in some detail and were in any case a relatively specialised commodity. The book does consider at several points the Lottery Tickets issued during the period, available in denominations of £10 and therefore capable of wide circulation amongst small-scale investors. However, there is very little discussion of the various forms of paper issued by government departments, especially those connected with the war. The army issued salary debentures and clothing assignments, and the Ordnance Office and the Navy, Victualling, Sick and Hurt and Transport Boards various bills and tickets. Many carried interest, and there is strong evidence that there was a vibrant secondary market – energised by continual warfare betweeen 1689 and 1697 – that discounted and invested this form of debt. The importance of warfare to the stock-market boom of the 1690s, which is listed as only one of several factors, may therefore have been understated. Certainly the massive expansion of the army and navy, which together deployed over 200,000 men each year, as well as the large number of contractors who were paid in navy or ordnance bills, brought far more people into at least temporary contact with paper debt than the 5,000 estimated by Murphy as participating in the civilian market.

However, this criticism should not detract from a positive assessment of what is an extremely detailed and lucid discussion of a formative but under-studied period in the development of English financial markets, and which deserves a wide audience.