Participants

John Bergin

Observer

Affiliation

Irish Legislation [1692-1800] Project, Queen's University Belfast

Publications

"The Quaker Lobby and its Influence on Irish Legislation, 1692–1705". Eighteenth Century Ireland 19 (2004)

Michael Brown

Chair, Session 1

Affiliation

Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies, Trinity College Dublin

Publications


The Irish Enlightenment, 1690-1798. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming

Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850 (ed. with Charles Ivar McGrath and Thomas Power). Dublin: Four Courts Press, forthcoming

Universities and the Common Good in Early Modern Europe (ed. with Helga Robinson-Hammerstein). Dublin: Four Courts Press, forthcoming

“The Strange Case of Dr. King and Mr. Hutcheson”. In Christopher Fauske (ed.), Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Contexts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 125-137

“The Injured Lady and her British Problem: the Union in Political Thought”. In Patrick M. Geoghegan and James Kelly (eds.), The Irish Act of Union: Bicentennial Essays (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 37-49

"John Toland and the Problem of the Irish Enlightenment". In Edna Longley, Eamonn Hughes and Des O'Rawe (eds.), Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons (Belfast, 2003)

Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719-1730: the Crucible of his Thought. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002

“Does Revolution Make Moral Sense? Political Options in Ireland and Scotland in the 1790s”, Bullán 6:2 (Winter/Spring 2002):67-81

The Medieval World and the Modern Mind (ed. with Stephen Harrison). Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000

“The Medieval Critic: the Strange Trajectory of Alasdair MacIntyre”. In Stephen Harrison (ed.), The Medieval World and the Modern Mind (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 27-39

“Creating a Canon: Dugald Stewart's Construction of the Scottish Enlightenment”, History of Universities, vol. 16 (2000):135-54

“Francis Hutcheson and the Molesworth Connection”. Eighteenth-Century Ireland 14 (1999):62-76

“The Ministry of Ethics: Francis Hutcheson and the Language of New Light Theology”. In Kevin Herlihy (ed.), Propagating the Word of Irish Dissent (Dublin, 1998), 95-113

Alan Downie

Chair, Session 2

Affiliation

Goldsmiths College, University of London

Publications

“Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere”. In Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Malden, MA, and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 58-79

“Public Opinion and the Political Pamphlet”. In John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 549-571

“What if Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?”, The Library 7th series, 5 (2004):247-264

“How useful to eighteenth-century English studies is the paradigm of the 'bourgeois public sphere'?”, Literature Compass 1 (2003):18C 022, 1-18

“‘The Coffee Hessy spilt’ and Other Issues in Swift’s Biography”. In Herman J. Real and Helgard Stöver Leidig (eds.), Reading Swift: Papers from The Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), 65-75

“The Political Significance of Gulliver's Travels”. In Albert J. Rivero (ed.), Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: A Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 334-352

Constructing Christopher Marlowe. Ed. with J.T. Parnell (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

“The Making of the English Novel”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9.3 (1997):249-266

To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678-1750 (Macmillan, 1994)

Robert Harley and the press: propaganda and public opinion in the age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge University Press, 1979)

Christopher Fauske

Chair, Session 5

Affiliation

School of Arts and Sciences, Salem State College, Salem, MA

Publications

“John Frederick MacNeice”. In James McGuire et al. (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Skipper Worse. Translated from the Norwegian of Alexander Kielland. Ed. Jeff Voccola (New York: Cross-Cultural Communications, 2006)

“Side by Side in a Small Country”: Bishop John Frederick MacNeice and Ireland (Keady, Northern Ireland: Church of Ireland Historical Society, 2005)

An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts. Ed. with Heidi Kaufman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004)

Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context. Ed. (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003)

Jonathan Swift and the Church of Ireland, 1710-24 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002)

Take Charge of Your Writing: the Power of Self-assessment. With David Daniel, Peter Galeno and Debbie Mael (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

“Some Other Culture: Maori Literature as a Unifying Force in a Multicultural Classroom”, Teaching English in the Two-Year College 26:1 (Sept. 1998):18-24

“Boyle, John (Orrery and Cork, Earl of)”. In Robert Hogan (ed.), Dictionary of Irish Literature (Greenwood, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1996)

“A Life Merely Glimpsed: Louis MacNeice at the End of the Anglo-Irish Tradition”. In Tjebbe Westendorp and Jane Mallinson (eds.), Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 181-98

“A Life Merely Glimpsed: Louis MacNeice at the End of the Anglo-Irish Tradition”, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 20.1 (Summer 1994):17-29

“A Matter of Dates: Yeats, Starkie, and The Silver Tassie”, Notes and Queries 235 (Dec. 1990):439-41

Natasha Glaisyer

“Venturing fortunes”: Lotteries and the financial revolution, 1694-1750

Abstract

This paper will address the question of how English state lotteries should be positioned in the history of the “financial revolution”. It will tackle this question by examining three issues. First, state lotteries were a controversial way of raising revenue and this paper will examine both objections to and justifications of lottery schemes as they were played out in pamphlets, newspapers, visual materials and diaries. The Rye merchant Samuel Jeake, for example, wrestled with his conscience in 1694 over buying a ticket in the Million Adventure; he questioned whether he should be playing this game of chance but convinced himself that its end, to raise money for the war against France, was a sufficient justification. Second, the paper will look at whether those who played the lottery—the “adventurers”—can be considered as “investors” in the fiscal-military state. The lottery offered the opportunity for individuals from across the whole social spectrum and throughout Britain to participate in what Christine Macleod has called a “fever of speculation”. Third, the paper will examine lottery tickets as a form of paper credit. Lottery tickets raised questions about what they represented, and they were also forged, lost, sent in the post and cut into pieces. Although lottery tickets had much in common with other forms of paper credit, there was also much that was peculiar to them. The paper will end by suggesting some ways that these three issues might help us to rethink the history of the financial revolution.

Affiliation

Department of History, University of York

Publications

The culture of commerce in England, 1660-1720, Royal Historical Society, Studies in History Series (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2006 forthcoming)

‘“A due circulation in the veins of the publick”: Imagining Credit in Late Seventeenth And Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 46.3 (Fall 2005 forthcoming)

‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in The Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Historical Journal 47 (2004):451-476

Didactic literature in England 1500-1800: expertise constructed. Ed. with Sara Pennell (London: Ashgate, 2003)

‘Readers, Correspondents and Communities: John Houghton’s A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1692–1703)’. In Alexandra Shepard and P. J. Withington (eds.), Communities in early modern England: networks, place, rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 235-51

‘Merchants at the Royal Exchange, 1660–1720’. In Ann Saunders (ed.), The Royal Exchange (London: London Topographical Society, 1997), 198–202

Hugh Goodacre

The “adventure for Irish land”: money, power and the roots of the financial revolution

Abstract

The fund raised in the City of London for the “adventure for Irish land” following the rebellion of 1641 has been described as an institutional precedent for the establishment of the Bank of England. As a joint-stock venture, it was second only to the East India Company, and, though far smaller in scale, it had very considerable impact both politically and in terms of the conceptual and practical roots of the emergence of modern banking. Politically, the initial drive for subscriptions was a central rallying point for parliamentary opinion in the run-up to civil war in England, and the struggle to retain possession of the fund was perhaps the final breaking-point in parliamentary relations with the crown. What has hitherto received less attention is the fact that, some sixteen years after the launch of the fund, the meetings of the adventurers in the City of London served as a significant forum for political as well as financial debate in the absence of a Parliament during the tense months preceding and following the death of Oliver Cromwell. Furthermore, the accounts of these meetings cast some light on what is among the most obscure episodes in the history of economic thought—the process through which William Petty formulated the wealth of ideas which arrived—presumably not from “nowhere”—in his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, which is widely regarded as a founding text of modern economic analysis. More narrowly, in relation to the history of banking, the history of this very public fund contrasts strongly with the narrowly-based process of the founding of the Bank of England. Nevertheless, it helped prepare the ideological, conceptual and linguistic resources for the process that was to culminate in the financial revolution that was to culminate half a century later.

Affiliation

Department of Economics, University College London

Publications

“Colonialism, displacement and cannibalism in early modern economic thought” [re Swift's Proposal]. In The representation of capital 1700-2000: speculation and displacement (2006 forthcoming)

“William Petty and early colonial roots of development economics”. In K.S. Jomo (ed.), Pioneers of Economic Development (New Delhi: Tulika Books; London: Zed Press. 2005)

“From Petty to Ricardo up to Sraffa”. History of Economic Thought Newsletter (September 2005)

James Hartley

Chair, Session 4

Affiliation

Department of Economics, Mount Holyoke College

Publications

“Kydland and Prescott’s Nobel Prize: The Methodology of Time Consistency and Real Business Cycle Models”, Review of Political Economy 18.1 (January 2006):1—28

“Should American Studies Study Itself?”, Academic Questions 17.2 (Spring 2004):33—44

“Modigliani's Expectations”, Eastern Economic Journal 30.3 (Summer 2004):429-40

“Mutual Deposit Insurance: Other Lessons from the Record”, The Independent Review 6.2 (Fall 2001):235-52

“The Great Books and Economics”, Journal of Economic Education 32.2 (Spring 2001):147-59

“Real Myths and a Monetary Fact”, Applied Economics 31 (1999):1325-29

Real Business Cycles: a Reader (ed. with Kevin D. Hoover and Kevin D. Salyer). London: Routledge, 1998

The Representative Agent in Macroeconomics. London: Routledge, 1997

“The Limits of Business Cycle Research: Assessing the Real Business Cycle Model” (with Kevin D. Hoover and Kevin D. Salyer), Oxford Review of Economic Policy 13.3 (1997):34-54

“The Origins of the Representative Agent”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 10.2 (Spring 1996):169-77

Richard Kleer

Colloquium co-organizer

Affiliation

Department of Economics, University of Regina

Publications

“Smith on teleology: a reply to Alvey”, History of Economics Review 40 (2004):145-49

“'The ruine of their Diana': Lowndes, Locke and the bankers”, History of Political Economy 36.3 (2004):533-56

“Reading the Wealth of Nations in context: rethinking the canon of mid-18th century British political economy”. In E. Forget & S. Peart (eds.), Reflections on the classical canon in economics (Routledge, 2001)

“The role of teleology in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations”, History of Economics Review 31 (Winter 2000):14-29

“The decay of trade: the politics of economic theory in eighteenth-century Britain”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 18 (1996):319-46

Charles Larkin

Charles Davenant and the great recoinage of 1696: an early modern economist’s perspective

Abstract

The English Great Re-coinage of 1696 was one of the great monetary events in history. The English currency, a bimetallic standard based on the weight and fineness of the coinage, was debased in order to pay troops in the Netherlands during the Nine Years War. By 1695 almost 50% of the specie content was missing from coinage in circulation, causing a monetary crisis. The May 1695 actions of demonetisation of England's debased coinage and the issuing of new full-weight coin were instrumental in the creation of the British Gold Standard. This national monetary standard became the International Gold Standard during the nineteenth century. Charles Davenant, an author of economic tracts, politician and civil servant, was an important voice during the re-coinage policy formulation period. Davenant's theory of paper credit and his model of the circular flow of income provide a reasoned and critical analysis of the English monetary system in the 1690s and the potential impact of policy options being entertained by the Crown. This paper attempts to look beyond the traditionally studied debate between John Locke, Isaac Newton and William Lowndes; into the deeper theoretical and political concepts behind the final decision to re-coin the English currency. In this paper the impact of Davenant's monetary theory and his submission to Lord Godophin on the action to re-coin will be investigated and placed within the wider context of the 1694-1695 Commission on the Coinage.

Affiliation

Department of Economics and Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin

Anne Laurence

“I have had considerable losses…by the fall in our money in this kingdom”: Mrs Bonnell’s Anglo-Irish business affairs

Abstract

This paper presents a case-study of Anglo-Irish business outside the mercantile and professional financial worlds, showing how a private individual combined a sophisticated understanding of exchange rates with a disastrous expedition into the stock market.

Mrs Jane Bonnell (d.1745), widow of the accountant-general of Ireland, and member of the numerous and widely connected Protestant Irish Conyngham family, moved to London in about 1705. Her husband left her some income, but she was also dependent on a mortgage arranged for her by her brother to provide an annual income of £140.

During the following 15 years she occupied herself with errands for her friends and relations in Ireland and for the Hastings sisters who lived outside London. She bought and conveyed goods to them in Ireland and received goods from them, building up a complex arrangement of debt and credit across the Irish sea which took account of exchange rate differentials between the two countries, the weakness of Irish banks, and the shortage of specie in Ireland.

She also took part in the stock market boom of 1720, buying stock both for herself and for her friends and relations but without much financial judgement for both they and she sustained considerable losses. From the mid-1720s she confined herself to more prosaic dealings and became increasingly reliant on an allowance from her wealthy sister, Katherine Conolly.

Affiliation

Department of History, Open University

Publications

“Women, godliness and personal appearance in seventeenth-century England”, Women's History Review (2006 forthcoming)

“Real and imagined communities in the lives of women in seventeenth-century Ireland: identity and gender”. In Sue Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin, Festschrift for Patricia Crawford (Ashgate, 2006 forthcoming)

“Women investors, 'That nasty South Sea affair' and the rage to speculate in early eighteenth century England”, Accounting, Business and Financial History (2006 forthcoming)

“Women in the British Isles in the sixteenth century”. In Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (eds), A Companion to Tudor Britain (Blackwell, 2004), 381-399

Eoin Magennis

Chair, Session 3

Affiliation

Research Fellow, Centre for Cross Border Studies, Armagh

Publications

“Writing the Political Economy of 18th century Ireland: A Review Article”, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, forthcoming

“Walter Harris and the Errors of Irish History”, History and Theory, forthcoming

Debates over Ireland and the First World War (ed. with Crónán Ó Doibhlin). Armagh: Eigse Orialla, 2006

“The Origins of the Armagh Troubles: A Document”, Seanchas Ard Mhacha 19:2 (2003)

“A Land of Milk and Honey: The Physico-Historical Society (1744-1752) and the Improvement of Ireland”, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, section C, 103 (2003)

“Patriotism, Popery and Politics: The 1753 By-election in County Armagh”. In A.J. Hughes (ed.), Armagh: History and Society. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002

“Protestant Nationalism in Ulster, 1890-1910: Francis Joseph Bigger and the writing of The Ulster Land War of 1770”, Seanchas Ard Mhacha 18.2 (2001)

The Irish Political System, 1740-1765. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000

Crowds in Ireland, 1720-1920 (ed. with Peter Jupp). Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2000

“Coal, Corn and Canals: the Dispersal of Public Moneys, 1695-1712”. In David Hayton (ed.), The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001)

“A Presbyterian Insurrection: Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak disturbances of July 1763”, Irish Historical Studies21 (1999)

Anthony Malcomson

Observer

Affiliation

Queen's University Belfast

Publications

The pursuit of the heiress: aristocratic marriage in Ireland 1750-1820, revised and enlarged edition (Belfast, Ulster Historical Foundation, forthcoming 2007)

Nathaniel Clements: government and the governing elite in Ireland, 1725-75 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005)

Archbishop Charles Agar: churchmanship and politics in Ireland, 1760-1810 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002)

John Foster: the politics of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)

C. Ivar McGrath

Chair, Orientation Session

Affiliation

School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin

Publications

Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850. Edited with Michael Brown and T. P. Power. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Forthcoming 2004.

"The provisions for conversion in the penal laws, 1695-1750". In Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850. Ed. Michael Brown, C. I. McGrath, and T. P. Power. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Forthcoming 2004.

"English Ministers, Irish Politicians and the Making of a Parliamentary Settlement in Ireland, 1692-5". English Historical Review cxix (June 2004):585-613.

"Parliament, People, and other Possibilities," Eighteenth-Century Ireland 17 (2002): 157-66.

"Parliamentary Additional Supply: the Development and Use of Regular Short-term Taxation in the Irish Parliament, 1692-1716," Parliamentary History 20 (2001):27-54.

"Central Aspects of the Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Framework in Ireland: the Government Supply Bill and Biennial Parliamentary Sessions, 1715-82," Eighteenth-Century Ireland 16 (2001):9-34.

The Making of the Eighteenth-Century Irish Constitution: Government, Parliament and the Revenue, 1692-1714. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.

"Securing the Protestant Interest: Policy, Politics and Parliament in Ireland in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1690-95". In Thomas Bartlett (ed.), History and Environment (Dublin: UCD, 1998), 70-81.

"Securing the Protestant Interest: the Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695," Irish Historical Studies 30 (1996-7):25-46.

Sean Moore

Edmund Burke's financial publicity: rhetoric, investment, and the state in mid-eighteenth century Britain

Abstract

It has long been noted that Burke viewed the French Revolution to be a consequence of France's national debt and worthless paper currency, which had been acquired assisting the Americans in their effort to gain independence. But his previous comments on finance have been neglected. This paper will contend that many canonical writers of the period served government as propagandists and that much of this publicity was for investment in British government securities. By examining how Burke was recruited for public service on the basis of his periodical contributions and other writings in the 1740s and 1750s, including An Account of the European Settlements in America, this essay will attempt to establish the relationship of “spin-doctoring” to confidence in public finance. Specifically, it will examine his defense of debt derived from the French and Indian War, his complaints about the perils of bad management in India during the Warren Hastings Trial, and his counterpoint to Thomas Paine's accusations in The Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance that British bonds and paper currency were “a governmental fraud”.

Affiliation

English Department, University of New Hampshire

Publications

“'Vested' Interests and Debt Bondage: Credit as Confessional Coercion in Colonial Ireland”, In Daniel Carey and Christopher Finlay (eds.), The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in the British Atlantic World, 1700-1800(Irish Academic Press, forthcoming)

“'Our Irish Copper-Farthen Dean?: Swift's Drapier's Letters, the 'Forging' of a Modernist Anglo-Irish Literature, and the Atlantic World of Paper Credit”, Atlantic Studies 2.1 (April 2005)

“The Culture of Paper Credit: the New Economic Criticism and the Postcolonial Eighteenth Century”, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45.2 (Summer 2004)

“Swift, Jonathan”. In Biographical Dictionary of British Economists, 2 vols. (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2004)

“Satiric Norms, Swift's Financial Satires, and the Bank of Ireland Controversy of 1720-1721”, Eighteenth Century Ireland 17 (2002)

“Taking the Bull by the Horns: the Edgeworths' Essay on Irish Bulls and the Historicizing of Irish 'Sly Civility'”. In Karen Vandevelde (ed.), New Voices in Irish Criticism. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002

“'Anglo-Irish' Hybridity: Problems in Miscegenation, Representation, and Postcolonialism in Irish Studies”, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 7.1 (Spring 2000)

Helen Julia Paul

The Darien Scheme and Anglophobia in Scotland

Abstract

Scottish attempts at financial innovation in the late seventeenth century included the Bank of Scotland and the Darien Scheme. The Bank is still in existence, but the Darien scheme's mission to site a Scottish colony on the isthmus of Darien, Panama, was a disaster. It has often been cited as one of the key reasons for the Union between Scotland and England in 1707, due to its devastating effects on the Scottish economy. Like the South Sea Bubble, the Darien scheme has been thought about in broad terms rather than being considered as an attempt to introduce financial innovation into a mercantilist world. The contemporary pamphlet literature is a record of the public debates of the period. The Scottish pamphlets which are in favour of the scheme largely advertise it as an important element in Scotland's continued survival as an independent state. After its failure, pamphleteers were quick to print Anglophobic tracts claiming an English plot to destroy Scotland's independence. This paper attempts to reconsider the debate. It shows that arguments against the scheme were often as faulty as those in favour of it. Indeed, many of the complaints were waged against the idea of joint-stock companies as being inherently likely to fail or as being in some way immoral. Similar complaints appeared against other joint-stock companies of the period, including the South Sea Company. One of the founders of the Bank of England, William Paterson, was behind the Darien scheme. His original intention was for a British, rather than purely Scottish, undertaking.

Affiliation

University of St. Andrews

Martyn Powell

The politics of credit and debt in Dublin, 1720-1783

Abstract

Ireland's gentry and middling sorts were very uneasy bedfellows in the burgeoning consumer society of the eighteenth century. New ways of earning wealth could threaten gentry and aristocratic dominance, and from a middling-sort perspective, Irish aristocrats had a distinctly unsteady commitment to the Irish manufacturing sector. Using contemporary correspondence, parliamentary debates, newspaper reports and pamphlets, my paper looks at this battle-ground focusing upon the intersection of credit and debt with patriotism in mid-eighteenth-century Dublin. More specifically, it begins with the issue of ungoverned expenditure by members of the middling orders, and then proceeds to look at the sympathetic treatment of imprisoned debtors by the parliament, patriotic press, and wider public opinion. Indeed the schemes for the relief of these individuals offer another avenue of exploration; they included viceregal munificence, parliamentary acts, and charitable theatrical performances and masquerades. On the other hand patriotic societies like the Gleeg Club criticised aristocrats for taking advantage of credit and failing to “pay the people”. Patriot newspapers took the same tack, and the Freeman's Journalregularly targeted MPs—such as Sir Henry Cavendish—for their mistreatment of creditors. Broader public concern on the subject of paper credit resulted in a flurry of pamphlets in 1760, including A letter from a shop-keeper and The New Bankers proved Bankrupts. The final area for discussion is the rise of politicised consumers and producers within Dublin's middling sort, prepared to use their commercial muscle—during the Money Bill and Free Trade disputes—against those deemed as unpatriotic. This paper demonstrates that the producer/consumer relationship between Dublin's social classes was complicated and fraught. Consumer goods—often purchased on credit—could now blur the lines between upper and lower sorts, and between Catholic and Protestant. At the same time personal debt in the short term was unpatriotic, and in the long term might result in members of the elite being so financially straitened that they were incapable of maintaining their dignity, and by extension, political status.

Affiliation

Modern British History, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Publications

The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Palgrave: Basingstoke and New York, 2005)

‘Popular Disturbances in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Origins of the Peep of Day Boys’, Irish Historical Studies 135 (2006)

Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (Palgrave: Basingstoke and New York, 2003)

‘Charles James Fox and Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 130 (2002)

‘British Party Politics and Imperial Control: The Rockingham Whigs 1756-1782’, Parliamentary History 21 (2002)

‘Ireland: Radicalism, Rebellion and Union’. In H. T. Dickinson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Blackwell: London, 2002)

‘The reform of the undertaker system: Anglo-Irish politics, 1750-67’, Irish Historical Studies 121 (1998)

‘Managing the Dublin Populace: The Importance of Public Opinion in Anglo-Irish Politics 1750-1772’, Irish Studies Review 16 (1996)

Stephen Timmons

West Country tin mining and the political economy, 1673-1697

Abstract

Political upheavals during the 1680s produced new debate concerning the regulation of the tin mining stannaries of Devon and Cornwall, similar to the regulation that was taking place in borough corporations at the same time. Tories not surprisingly persuaded the Crown to limit representatives to the stannary parliaments to wealthy landowners, but also presented a proposal for introducing a tin farthing as specie for circulation in the New World to improve royal finances, and encouraged the government to begin buying a greater proportion of each year's output to create short-term earnings for itself, particularly as public expenditures increased markedly during wartime. Mainstream opposition leaders supported Tory proposals, even as radical merchants attempted to wrest control of the preemption and coinage of tin from the narrow interests of the London pewterers guild and Westminster courtiers, who traditionally farmed the Crown's monopsony, by increasing the amounts and proportion of royal revenue. The argument spilled out into the public sphere for the first time with the publication of the Tinners' Grievances and Aggravii Venetiani in 1697, as Thomas Tresilian argued that revised Crown direction would benefit both the West Country economy and government finances. The debate over the regulation of West Country tin mining revealed in a microcosm the same network of political forces and the same mechanisms of decision making that were operative in larger issues of public finance.

Affiliation

Humanities Department, Columbus State Community College

Publications

“Witchcraft and Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Devon”, Journal of Early Modern History (forthcoming)

“From Persecution to Toleration in the West Country, 1672-1692”, Historian (Phi Alpha Theta) (forthcoming)

“The Customs Service in the West Country, 1671-1692”, Mariner's Mirror (May 2006)

“Executions Following Monmouth's Rebellion: A Missing Link”, Historical Research (May 2003)

Patrick Walsh

“The sin of withholding tribute”: contemporary pamphlets and the professionalization of the Irish revenue service in the early eighteenth century

Abstract

In January 1721 James Forth, the secretary of the Revenue Commissioners in Dublin, wrote to the Reverend Jasper Brett thanking him for a copy of his discourse on The sin of withholding tribute. Forth informed Brett that the Revenue Commissioners had ordered the publication of his discourse and that copies were to be circulated to every port in the country. Brett's pamphlet, printed in Dublin in 1721, offers an insight into the operation of the revenue service in Ireland in the early eighteenth century, and indeed a cogent defence of the system. Unlike most of the economic pamphlets published in Ireland in the 1720s, the publication of this pamphlet was actively supported by the Irish administration, in this case the Revenue Board. Furthermore its circulation to every port on the Island ensured it was widely distributed if not widely read. The discussion of Brett's pamphlet, in this paper, will examine it in the context of the increased professionalization of the Irish revenue service as a part of the revolution in British public finance in the period following the Glorious Revolution. This pamphlet was one of the earliest examples of the improving literature produced to assist revenue officers in their collections, which literature was to become more common in Ireland as the eighteenth century progressed. This paper will argue that the greatest change in the Irish revenue service in this period was not its increased politicisation, as has been previously suggested, but the development of an efficient professional system of revenue collection and management, more suited to the needs of the new public finance pressures, innovations, and requirements of the early eighteenth British and Irish state. Comparisons will be drawn with the contemporary situation in Britain, to show just how much current practices were imported into the Irish system in this period.

Affiliation

Department of History, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin

Publications

Review of D. W. Hayton (ed.), Letters of Marmaduke Coghill, 1722-1738 (Dublin, 2005). In Eighteenth Century Ireland 20 (2006 forthcoming)

“'Permanent tranquillity will not be established while the present system is continued': Charles James Fox and Ireland 1801-1803”. In Anne Dolan et al. (eds.), Robert Emmett, bicentenary essays (2006 forthcoming)

“The differing motivations for preventing transatlantic emigration: a case study from west Ulster 1718-1729”. In Shane Murphy et al. (eds.), Beyond the anchoring grounds: more crosscurrents in Irish and Scottish Studies(Belfast 2005)