Results

We have integrated all of the works cited in papers for the 2006 colloquium into the comprehensive bibliography that resulted from the 2004 colloquium. The result is attached to this page as a PDF. A copy of the original Word document is available upon request to Chris.

It was agreed at the final session of the colloquium that there weren't enough papers available for a new conference volume. Instead, Martyn Powell offered to pursue the possibility of a special issue with the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Scholars interested in contributing to this special issue should contact Chris Fauske.

It was also agreed that there was ample interest in a third colloquium. It is tentatively scheduled for June 2008. The organizers will look for a suitable location at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. They also agreed to develop a call for papers that would be more specific than previous editions, targeting areas of investigation that are central to the financial revolution but have not yet been addressed in either of the first two colloquia. The possibility of a guided readings session was also mooted.

Here are my reflections on the events of the second colloquium itself.

First of all, and I know it's been said before, thank you to everyone who made the colloquium a success.

The sense of those of us who worked to put this event together was that all of you helped generate a worthwhile intellectual enterprise with a thoroughly enjoyable three days in Armagh. As we were talking during Session V and afterwards, it became clear that many of us have projects that will be better informed because of our time together.

Martyn Powell, as promised, contacted the British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies and received an expression of interest in an issue dedicated to the themes and topics of Money, Power, and Prose. The journal would expect one or perhaps two more essays than are likely to come out of the colloquium itself. But we can most likely attract these from scholars who were interested in our work but unable to attend the event itself.

We are delighted that as a group the consensus was to convene a third colloquium. We have begun looking at the possibility of holding the 2008 colloquium in St John’s, Newfoundland, in late June. As soon as a decision about that is made, you will be notified by e-mail.

On the subject of e-mail. We have decided not to list your e-mail addresses on the web site in order to limit the potential for exposing you to yet more spam and junk e-mail. Should you wish to know the e-mail address of someone at the colloquium, feel free to e-mail any of the organizers, and the pertinent address will be sent back to you with reasonable timeliness.

Here are some thoughts on what happened in Armagh:

One of you wrote that “the event … was important for me as it confirms that interdisciplinary work and Economic History work are valued despite the RAE and the increasing standardisation of Economics departments.” This is a sentiment in keeping, I suspect, with that of the person who remarked that “what really made the difference was [that invitations were] issued just to those scholars who were active in the relevant or adjacent field. In practice this meant young or youngish scholars who had not gone stale.” While it was not the intention of the organisers to aim for the younger end of the scholarly spectrum, we were delighted to see the atmosphere of inquiry and collaboration that established itself at the colloquium.

Someone else described the colloquium as “certainly the most enjoyable – and the most profitable – one that I have attended.” While we certainly have nothing against joy, it is the second of those two thoughts that we hope captures the results for all of you.

However, there is always room for improvement, and thanks to your advice at the final session, we intend to aim for only two papers per session at the 2008 colloquium. We will also consider a session for discussing some common set of contemporary readings. You may also recall that all of you (most of you?) offered to help draft the CFP we hope to issue reasonably soon for the 2008 event. Look for a draft of that to appear soon in your e-mail in boxes.

Work on updating the bibliography has started, albeit a little more slowly than you might have hoped. However, by virtue of this delay there is still time for you to send revised / reformatted / otherwise improved bibliographies to Chris Fauske if you are so inclined.

On a related note, you also helped us understand that the name of the enterprise could be refined. We have, therefore, changed the title of the project to Money, Power, and Print: Studies of the British financial revolution 1688-1776. There will be a new address for the colloquium as well. Look for an announcement soon.

We do hope you will feel free to keep in touch with each other should you have questions about the subject, and also that you will be in touch with us when the CFP for St. John’s appears, either to submit a proposal for a paper or to signal your interest in attending as a participant observer.

It might be, too, that at some point in time you will have the opportunity to review a book or two that will enable you to reflect to a broader audience upon the work we have begun. If that happens, we hope you will feel free not to be shy.

By the way, in Dublin on the way back to the U.S. a fine example of how to transact currency exchange without banks took place when one of us asked his two traveling companions, neither bound at that time for the States, if he felt like exchanging sterling for euros. The exchange took place with the two of them agreeing, with only the vaguest understanding of what the official exchange might have been, to swap just all the sterling one of them had for most of the euros the other had. That neither felt ill done-by was the point. That the official exchange rate had been consulted only theoretically and fleetingly might serve, had the transaction been recorded, only to confuse later historians of the practicalities of crossing the border from sterling land into the euro zone.

In closing, we would like to thank the session chairs. They might have been veterans of MPP's first iteration in Regina but, trust us, they made the job of chairing their own, and they made it look far easier than it was.

Carol Conlin at the Armagh Public Library and Joseph Canning at the Ó Fiaich Library made so much of what we did so much easier than it might have been, and Eoin Magennis made us all feel at home in Armagh even before we arrived.

To those three in particular, our thanks.

And to you, for making the venture so worthwhile.