The author, Carl Wennerlind, states that the purpose of this book is to “reveal the intellectual underpinnings of the English Financial Revolution” (3). The means for so doing is by focusing on early modern printed materials such as pamphlets, books, and broadsheet newspapers that engaged with particular monetary or financial crises in the period 1620–1720. Therein, the author acknowledges that his “descriptions of the economic and political conditions contributing to each crisis,” and “when possible,” the accounts he provides of their “resolution and aftermath” are by necessity secondary to the focus of the book. This work is therefore very much about “the discourse regarding credit” (3), or the “discourse and configuration of credit” (198), in the hundred years under review, and therefore, aside from the final chapter, makes little or no use of manuscript primary source materials. The book is also explicitly acknowledged by the author as being Anglocentric in focus, even though academics since the publication in 1967 of P. G. M. Dickson's Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 have expanded the geopolitical boundaries for consideration of the financial revolution (a trend that the author's own recourse to non-English writers such as Jonathan Swift and William Paterson bears witness to), in the same way that the current endeavor purposefully builds upon the groundbreaking work by Henry Roseveare and others in extending the chronology for that phenomenon. At the same time, although the subtitle of the book includes the term “Financial Revolution,” it is primarily about only one aspect of that phenomenon—contemporary discourses about credit—and not, as the seminal works of Roseveare and others are, about the whole complex infrastructure, ideology, and history of the seismic financial changes that occurred in the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which ultimately facilitated the expansion of public credit.

The book is divided into six chapters, each of which focuses upon a particular period and crisis. The chosen format does at times result in the chapters reading as individual essays or articles rather than as connecting sections of an overarching thesis or argument. Apart from the author's use of printed contemporary sources throughout, the other consistencies in focus are the ways in which people's attitudes toward coin and credit altered during the period and “the social imaginary of credit” (13). A further connecting theme is of course the word “casualty” itself, which is explicitly engaged with at the outset and then more implicitly in various chapters, though most pertinently in relation to the slave trade. In this respect, Wennerlind reminds us that the basis for the restoration of public credit by Robert Harley and the South Sea Company from 1710–11 onward was the enslavement of Africans in the West Indies and South America. He also clarifies and explicates the fact that few people at the time, if at all, paid heed to the human suffering and agency of the slaves. The other human casualties of credit are also present throughout the book, though apart from those who suffered the death penalty for clipping coin or similar forgery or fraud, the varied human flotsam and jetsam left in credit's wake were not always as easily tracked down, identified, or displayed either then or now.

The author seems most comfortable in chapters 4, 5, and 6, when dealing with the great recoinage of 1696 and the origins and history to the late 1710s of the South Sea Company. Although there are gaps in the relevant history of these events and occurrences, the arguments put forward and the engagement with the extent to which the writers of the time truly influenced and had an impact upon events—or not, as the case may be—is handled best by the author in these chapters. Chapter 6 also provides a valuable engagement with the history of the South Sea Company, and utilizes to effect important British Library Additional Manuscripts on the subject. The first three chapters of the book seem a little less assured, with at times apparently cursory and basic contextualization of the printed material and authors under review. The tendency not to explicitly locate a given work chronologically within the text or to highlight which particular work is being referred to, which therefore requires regular toing and froing by the reader to the notes at the end of the book in order to contextualize the material, adds to a sense of being in uncertain territory.

Stylistically, it is therefore a pity in this instance that notes were included at the end of the book rather than as footnotes. There is a huge wealth of material and text provided in the notes, clarifying, explaining, and adding to arguments and information provided in the main body of the text, and it would have been better to have integrated the textual material in the notes into the body of the book. That said, the diligent reader will extract much of value from these extensive notes, as they will from the book as a whole, which adds another layer to our increasing understanding of the world of money and finance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and especially about the way in which people wrote about, and either understood or misunderstood, what was happening around them in relation to credit.