Participants

Jill Bradbury

Observer

Affiliation

English Department, Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C.

Publications

Anglo-Irish Identities, 1571-1845 (coeditor). Bucknell University Press, 2008 forthcoming

"Domestic, Moral, and Political Economies in Swift's Irish Writings." In Anglo-Irish Identities, 1571-1845. Bucknell University Press, 2008 forthcoming

"New Science and the 'New Species of Writing:' Eighteenth-Century Prose Genres". Eighteenth-Century Life(February 2003)

Dwight Codr

Generations of biters: providence in the time of the projecting humour

Abstract

Concentrating on the case of England, this essay uncovers ways in which the central objections to usury articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resurface in modified form during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because lending for interest had become a sine qua non of the financial revolution, it is often assumed that the usury question at some point over the course of the seventeenth century became moot. I argue that this is not the case. In particular, the Lutheran objection to usury, which based itself upon the idea that the individual cannot and should not presume to dictate a future that only Providence can realize, reappears in the context of discussions about what Defoe called "the Projecting Humour" and then again in popular moralistic advocacy of that quintessentially middle-class virtue of prudence. Anxieties about the role of Providence in a world whose future was being increasingly shaped by "Inventions of Human Original" (Defoe) and their prudential inventors can be witnessed not only in the large body of works critical of projects, but in Defoe's famous defense of the same, An Essay upon Projects (1697). Lending had been rationalized and institutionalized by the Bank of England, which served as both metaphor and metonymy for the nation of England, a nation that was itself in some ways a Providentially ordained entity. Similarly, Defoe attempts to rationalize projects by arguing for their national importance, but it was nevertheless the case that most projects were for private rather than public benefit, so we find Defoe unable to mount a complete defense of all projects in light of his Providentialist view of human history and futurity (wherein no space for private projects appears to exist in his eyes). When the conflict between Providence and the forward-looking individual is rendered still more abstract in the prudence literature, writers of various stripes begin recognize the narrative opportunities presented by this initially financial drama and thus evolves a popular plot of the imprudent traveler being guided by Providence to a state of practical wisdom.

Affiliation

Department of English, Tulane University

Chrysta Collins

Presenter, Session I

Affiliation

Communication Officer, The Rooms, St. John's, Newfoundland

Christine Desan

Reconceiving the creation story: money, credit, and the advent of capitalism

Abstract

Capitalism, many have agreed, is a matter of money. As a means of exchange, money is necessary, even indispensable, to the burgeoning economic activity of the modern order. Acknowledged as essential, however, money is dismissed in the next breath: as a means of exchange, it is merely a marker, a conduit or a neutral conductor. It is a constant in nature if not quantity, distribution, or material.

In fact, capitalism is a matter of money. But that is not because money is either neutral or constant. Precisely to the contrary, money is a constitutional medium; it can take many forms and has undergone radical change. That character follows from its distinctive capacity: Money is an instrument that represents material value. Representing value requires and reflects an immense amount of orchestration; the practices supporting and instilling a common conviction that a token holds value include commitments made at the political, legal, and conceptual levels. Representing value, in other words, depends on a set of relations that connects a government, or other organized group, and its members. And as monies change, so do the societies they construct and reflect.

Capitalism came of age with a new approach to representing value -- a new form of money. It displaced a world in which people had configured very differently those connections between themselves that produced the conviction of value in a token. Most basically, both English and American communities began with monies based on a public charge and moved to monies based on public debt. In the first order, governments exacted a price for creating liquidity either in coin or public credit currencies (tallies or colonial paper money). In the following order, they assumed the costs for making money either at the mint or by borrowing notes at interest, ultimately in partnership with banks to which they allowed the profit on new currency creation. Both strategies created money that represented material value by orchestrating the relationship between central authority and its members, and between members themselves. Each strategy operated, however, by a wholly different array of legal, political, and even conceptual commitments. The paper will trace the way that transforming monies rendered and reflected a dramatic change in the character of the Anglo-American political economies.

Affiliation

Harvard Law School

Publications

The Practice of Value: Money, Governance, and the Coming of Capitalism (in manuscript)

"From the Mercantilist World to Market-Based Liberalism: Money as a Constitutional Medium," Fulton Series, University of Chicago Law School (2008 forthcoming)

From Blood to Profit: The Transformation of Value in the American Constitutional Tradition", Journal of Policy History 26 (2007)

"Money Talks: Listening to a History of Value," Common-Place 6:3 (April 1, 2006)

"Out of the Past: Time and Movement in Making the Present", Unbound, A Journal of Legal Reconstruction(online) 2 (Spring 2005)

"The Market as a Matter of Money: Denaturalizing Economic Currency in American Constitutional History," Law and Social Inquiry (Winter 2005)

Alan Downie

Chair, Session V

Affiliation

Goldsmiths College, University of London

Publications

"Marlowe, May 1593, and the 'Must-Have' Theory of Biography", Review of English Studies 58 (2007):245-267

"Who Says She's a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen's Novels", Eighteenth-Century Studies 40/1 (2006):69-84

Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, Volume 6: The Poor Man's Plea (1698) and The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd (1724) Ed. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006)

Constructing Christopher Marlowe. Paperback edition. Ed. with J. T. Parnell (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

"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)

Catherine Eagleton

Chair, Session VI

Affiliation

British Museum

Christopher Fauske

Chair, Session VIII

Affiliation

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

Publications

Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles. Ed. with Charles Ivar McGrath (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008 forthcoming)

"Misunderstanding What Swift Misunderstood or, the Economy of a Province". In Chris Fauske and C. Ivar McGrath (eds.), Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008 forthcoming)

Skipper Worse. Translated from the Norwegian of Alexander Kielland. Ed. Jeff Voccola (New York: Cross-Cultural Communications, 2007)

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

"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

Joyce Goggin

Chair, Session VII

Affiliation

Literature, Film and New Media, University of Amsterdam

Publications

"Baccarat, Globalization and the Politics of Seduction" (co-authored with René Glas). In Christoph Lindner (ed.), James Bond and Casino Royale: Revisioning 007 (Wallflower Press, forthcoming)

"'Nigella's deep-frying a Bounty Bar!': The Gilmore Girls and Addiction as a Social Construct". In Screwball Television: Gilmore Girls (forthcoming)

"Fantasy and Finance: What Play Money Does in Game Worlds". In The Computer Culture Reader (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming)

"Ocean's Eleven: From Remake to Sequel". In Caroline Jess and Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Sequels: New Theories of Remaking and Sequelization (SUNY Press, forthcoming)

"Casinos and Sure Bets: Ocean's Eleven and Cinematic Money". In Money and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming)

"Gaming/Gambling: Addiction and the Videogame Experience". In Gameplay: Pleasures, Engagements, Aesthetics (MacFarlane, forthcoming)

"Jane Austen Reloaded: Portraits and Adaptations". Persuasions On-Line (http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/)

"Modernity and Mind: Addicted to Play". In Manthos Santorineos (ed.), Gaming Realities: A Challenge for Digital Culture (Athens: FOURNOS Centre for Digital Culture, 2006), 46-55

"The Playing Card's Progress: A Brief History". The Games Reader, 2006(http://reconstruction.eserver.org/061/contents.shtml)

"Dire Straits: Paul Auster's The Music of Chance and Economic Loss". Critical Studies: Metaphors of Economy 25 (2005):125-134

"Metaphor and Madness: Stacking the Deck on Iraq". Bad Subjects, March 2005 (http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2005/goggin.html)

"A History of Otherness: Tarot and Playing Cards from Early Modern Europe". Journal for the Academic Study of Magic 1 (2003):45-73

"Images of Nationhood: Currency Art". In Travelling Concepts III: Memory, Image, Narrative (Amsterdam: ASCA Press, 2003), 253-277

"Making Meaning Happen at the High End of Low-Life". In Travelling Concepts II: Metaphor, Meaning, Frame(Amsterdam: ASCA Press, 2002), 43-61

Farley Grubb

Creating Maryland's paper money economy, 1720-1739: the role of power, print and markets

Abstract

Maryland's paper money experiment for the years 1733 through 1764 was unique among the American colonies. In 1733 Maryland authorized the issuance of 90,000 Maryland pounds in paper money. The quantity of bills in circulation was less than this authorized sum by varying amounts. While other colonies backed their paper money with future taxes and land mortgages, Maryland's bills were backed through the creation of a sinking fund. The money for this fund came from a 15 pence tax on every hogshead of tobacco exported from the colony, and was used to purchase stock in the Bank of England. This fund was to be used to redeem the bills in two stages, in each case by converting a sufficient amount of the sinking fund into sterling bills of exchange and exchanging them for Maryland pounds at a rate of three pounds sterling for every four Maryland pounds. This rate was considered the par exchange rate between sterling and Maryland currency. One-third of the bills were to be redeemed in 1748 and the remaining two-thirds in 1764. Maryland's sinking fund provides a yearly measure of the current value of what backed Maryland's paper money. Evidence on price indices in Maryland pounds and pounds sterling, exchange rates of Maryland pounds to sterling, the quantity of Maryland bills in circulation, and the value of the sinking fund are used to evaluate what determined the value of paper money and explain how paper-money systems worked in colonial America.

Part of this study uses extensive discussions in the press and by prominent people of the day (contentious debates) regarding paper money and how they understood it. For example, Benjamin Franklin commented on Maryland's paper money scheme and compared it with Pennsylvania's "land-bank" paper money system. Franklin liked PA's paper money because it was backed by land contemporaneously -- though not backed by specie, and he didn't like Maryland's paper money system because, while it was backed by specie at a promised fixed rate of redemption, that promised redemption was only at some distant future date. Franklin thought that without having Maryland's paper money pay interest, it was doomed to lose value. The issue of whether or not to have paper money pay interest was troubling to colonials and it was difficult for them to reach a consensus of understanding about its need or effect. It was tried sometimes and not others. Some colonists argued that paper money drove out specie, others thought not, and so on. This was also wrapped up in sometimes contentious political battles between Britain's colonial governors and their respective colonial assemblies regarding both power prerogatives and also who controls the colonial revenue purse vis-a-vis issuing paper money. For example, PA governors mostly fought their assembly over paper money issues and revenues, whereas Maryland's governor by the end of Maryland's first experiment in 1764 was won over and became an advocate to the Crown for continuing Maryland's paper money system from 1767 on -- which it quietly did into the Revolution. All these battles hinged on how the various parties understood how paper money worked, how it held its value, etc. And lying behind that was whether this understanding was based on narrow commercial self-interest or on a broader view of the economy and its development. Assessing these hidden motives requires some knowledge about how the economy actually worked.

Affiliation

University of Delaware

Publications

"The Continental Dollar: How Much Was Really Issued?" Journal of Economic History 68 (2008):283-91

"The Spoils of War: U.S. Federal Government Finance in the Aftermath of the War for Independence, 1784-1802". In R. Torres Sanchez (ed.), War, State and Development: Fiscal-Military States in the Eighteenth Century(EUNSA, 2007), pp. 133-56

"The Net Worth of the U.S. Federal Government, 1784-1802", American Economic Review--Papers and Proceedings 97 (2007):280-84

"The Constitutional Creation of a Common Currency in the U.S. Monetary Stabilization versus Merchant Rent Seeking". In L. Jonung and J. Nautz (eds.), Conflict Potentials in Monetary Unions (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 19-50

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2006

"Benjamin Franklin and Colonial Money: A Reply to Michener and Wright--Yet Again", Econ Journal Watch3 (2006):484-510

"The U.S. Constitution and Monetary Powers: An Analysis of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional Transformation of the U.S. Monetary System", Financial History Review 13 (2006):43-71

"Theory, Evidence, and Belief--the Colonial Money Puzzle Revisited: Reply to Michener and Wright", Econ Journal Watch 3 (2006):45-72

"State 'Currencies' and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Reply--Including a New View from Canada", American Economic Review 95 (2005): 1341-48

"The Circulating Medium of Exchange in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1729-1775: New Estimates of Monetary Composition, Performance, and Economic Growth", Explorations in Economic History 41 (2004):329-60

"Creating the U.S.-Dollar Currency Union, 1748-1811: A Quest for Monetary Stability or a Usurpation of State Sovereignty for Personal Gain?" American Economic Review 93 (2003): 1778-98

Neil Guthrie

The Jacobite response to the South Sea Bubble in literature and material culture

Abstract

The bursting of the South Sea Bubble provided a significant opportunity for the Jacobite cause. The 'flight of cashiers' took many of the principal actors in the rise and fall of the Company to the continent. Most important among these was Robert Knight who, with his records of the questionable financial dealings of King George I, found his way to Rome and the Pretender.

Jacobite poetry and printed propaganda depicts the Bubble as the latest example of the maladministration of public affairs since the 'glorious' revolution of 1688, and as further evidence of the corruption of Britain's new rulers. I also wish to argue that the South Sea Bubble informs the content of a widely distributed piece of Jacobite material culture, the famous Unica Salus medal of 1721. The medal offers a cogent critique of a Hanoverian Britain characterised by greed and speculation in the financial markets, and by other forms of moral depravity. For his adherents, James was (to translate the legend which appears on the medal) the only safeguard against or salvation from civic ruin and the natural disasters, in the form of plague and fire, that were likely to accompany it.

The Jacobites lacked, however, a positive programme beyond the achievement of their immediate goal of placing James back on the thrones of his ancestors. The inability to articulate a coherent post-restoration agenda contributed to the failure of the Jacobite enterprise -- thereby adding the South Sea Bubble to the long list of the Cause's missed opportunities.

Affiliation

Independent Scholar, Toronto

Publications

"'A Polish Lady': The Art of the Jacobite Print". 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era15 (2008 forthcoming)

Review of P. Baines & P. Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford UP, 2007). Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews On-line (EBRO), www.csulb.edu/ebro. Forthcoming

Review of W.L. Gibson, Art and Money in the Writings of Tobias Smollett (Bucknell UP, 2007). The Scriblerian 40 (2008 forthcoming)

Review of Nicholas Amhurst, Terræ-Filius or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford, ed. W. Rivers (Delaware UP, 2004). Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews On-line (EBRO), www.csulb.edu/ebro

Review of A.R. Le Sage, The Devil upon Crutches, trans. T. Smollett, ed. O.M. Brack, Jr, & L.A. Chilton (U. of Georgia Press, 2005). The Scriblerian 39 (2007):54-6

"Unica Salus (1721): A Jacobite Medal and its Context". The Georgian Group Journal 15 (2006):88-120

"Some Latin Inscriptions on Jacobite Medals". The Medal 48 (Spring 2006):23-32

Review of Bradford K. Mudge, When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature (OUP, 2004). Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews On-line (EBRO), www.csulb.edu/ebro

"The Memorial of the Chevalier de St. George (1726): Ambiguity and Intrigue in the Jacobite Propaganda War". Review of English Studies 55 (2004):545-64

"New Light on Lady Vane". Notes & Queries 247, new series 49 (2002):372-8

"'No Truth or Very Little in the Whole Story'? A Reassessment of the Mohock Scare of 1712". Eighteenth-Century Life 20 (1996):33-56

"A Possible Source for Smollett's Peregrine Pickle". Notes & Queries 234, new series 36 (1989):58

James Hartley

Chair, Session IV

Affiliation

Department of Economics, Mount Holyoke College

Publications

Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings (ed.). Doorlight Publications, 2008 forthcoming

"Representative Agent". In William Darity et al. (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2008), pp. 173-74

"The Chameleon Daniel Defoe: Public Writing in the Age Before Economic Theory". In Chris Fauske and Ivar McGrath (eds.), Money, Power and Prose: Interdisciplinary Studies of the Financial Revolution in the British Isles, 1688-1756 (University of Delaware Press, 2008)

"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

Chair, Session II

Affiliation

Department of Economics, University of Regina

Publications

"Fictitious Cash": English Public Finance and Paper Money, 1689-97. In Christopher Fauske and Ivar McGrath (eds.), Money, power and print: interdisciplinary studies on the British financial revolution (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 70-114.

"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

Eoin Magennis

Chair, Session I

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)

Sean Moore

Respondent, Session III

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)

Anne Murphy

Observer

Affiliation

Department of History, University of Exeter

Publications

"A servant of two masters: the Bank of England, its shareholders and the state, 1694-1720". In O. Feiertag and M. Margairaz (eds.), Gouverner une banque centrale du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (forthcoming 2007)

"'Come vanno i titoli'? Informazione e investimenti a Londra alla fine del XVII secolo", Quaderni Storici XLI (2007):133-154

"Investing in the financial revolution", European Association for Banking and Financial History Bulletin 2 (2006):12-17

"Dealing with uncertainty: managing personal investment in the early English national debt", History 91 (2006):200-217

"Lotteries in the 1690s: investment or gamble?", Financial History Review 12 (2005):227-246

"Irrational exuberance in the 1690s". In S. Eckett (ed.), The UK Stock Market Almanac, 2006 (London, 2005)

Helen Julia Paul

Politicians and public reaction to the South Sea Bubble: preaching to the converted?

Abstract

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 has commonly been thought of as a disaster for the stock market and Georgian society. Recent revisionist work has queried whether the economic dislocation was indeed severe. The South Sea Company itself continued to trade in slaves with the Royal Navy's assistance. However, the outcry at the crash led to the trial of the South Sea Company directors for bribery. It also helped to establish Robert Walpole as the pre-eminent statesman of his generation. This paper seeks to show that there was a silent majority who had either gained from financial innovations or were untouched by them. The vocal opponents of the South Sea directors had incentives to overstate their losses. Some were the type of uninformed traders who were likely to lose out in any stock market. Their presence was used as an excuse for a parliamentary enquiry. This paper will follow the rhetoric used to justify the witch-hunt and the means by which politicians sought to raise support for their activities. Evidence from pamphlets and the Commons debates will be used. Politicians benefited from a culture which condemned 'stock-jobbing' and the nouveau riche. However, the only real losers were those who had been involved in Exchange Alley in the first place. The show trials did not lead to the closure of the Alley. Many of the directors were quietly given back some of their confiscated property. The trials were an early example of political spin.

Affiliation

University of Southampton

Publications

"Joint-Stock Companies as the Sinews of War: The South Sea and Royal African Companies". In R. Torres Sanchez (ed.), War, State and Development: Military Fiscal States in the Eighteenth Century (EUNSA, 2007)

"British Asiento Slave-Traders and Conflict during the Triangular Trade". In Joám Evans Pim, Óscar Crespo Argibay and Bárbara Kristensen (eds.), Essays on Atlantic Studies: Rediscovering the Atlantic Maze (Galicia: IGESIP, 2006)

"The South Sea Company's Slaving Activities". In Proceedings of the Economic History Society Annual Conference, 2004

"The Macroeconomic Basis of the South Sea Bubble". In Proceedings of the Economic History Society Annual Conference, 2002

"What Economic History Means". In P. Hudson (ed.), Living Economic and Social History (Economic History Society, 2001)

Stephen Timmons

The Bank of England and Financial Markets in the West Country during the late seventeenth-century

Abstract

An analysis of Devon and Cornish subscribers to the Bank of England in 1694 helps determine to what extent subscriptions to the Bank replaced or supplemented regional financial networks, or created an entirely new one. Although admittedly a minority among the 1,268 subscribers, most of whom were from the area surrounding London, the politics of the thirteen from the West Country gives some insight into the dynamics underlying the creation of the Bank of England. The Revolution of 1688 spawned a new cadre of local leaders like Lord Sidney Godolphin, Hugh Boscawen, and Lord Edward Russell who cemented their position in local politics through their support of the new financial institution. Subscription provided a supplemental form of investment for substantial financiers, such as John Elwill, Christopher Bale, and Henry Greenhill, who were prepared to act as receivers for the numerous assessments levied by Parliament to meet the unprecedented costs of the Nine Years War. For other gentry and merchants, participating in raising funds to found the Bank competed with local investments in the woolen serge trade, Cornish tin mining, and the Newfoundland fisheries. For some, like widow Margaret Tuckfield, contributing to the Banks capital may have provided an alternative return to that from networks of local, personal loans. While subscriptions from Devon and Cornwall amounted to only £18,700, they heralded a new system of public revenue in the West Country.

Affiliation

Humanities Department, Columbus State Community College

Publications

"The Hearth Tax and Customs Duties in the West Country". In Chris Fauske and C. Ivar McGrath (eds.), Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008 forthcoming)

"Witchcraft and Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Devon", Journal of Early Modern History 10.4 (December 2006):297-330

"From Persecution to Toleration in the West Country, 1672-1692", Historian (Phi Alpha Theta) 68.3 (Fall 2006):461-88

"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 Bubble on the periphery: Ireland and the South Sea Bubble, 1720-21

Abstract

The South Sea Bubble was the first great crisis of the financial revolution, and has long been the subject of historiographical analysis. Much of this work has, however, focused on the political and financial effects of the Bubble in England, with little reference to the rest of the British polity. Subscriptions to the South Sea scheme, however, came from all parts of the British Isles and the effects of the Bubble, were not confined to London, or even England.1 This paper will seek to examine the effects of the Bubble on Ireland.

Contemporaries and later historians both commented on the negative effects of the Bubble on the Irish economy.2 That there were substantial Irish losses in the Bubble has always been acknowledged, but little evidence has been put forward either in contemporary writings or in modern historiography to substantiate these claims. This paper will attempt to examine more closely the level of Irish investment in the South Sea Scheme, and the other subsidiary schemes that developed in its wake. The effects of the outward flow of specie and other Irish assets will be examined as will the contention that the collapse of these schemes contributed to the downturn in the Irish economy that continued throughout the 1720s.

The collapse of the Bubble has often been linked to the failure of the proposals to establish the Bank of Ireland in 1721, both in terms of investor confidence (or lack of confidence) and to increased suspicion of such enterprises.3 Certainly the proposal to include a form of national debt conversion along the lines of the English example was unwelcome, although primarily because of political considerations. This paper hopes to probe further into the reasons for the failure of the bank. Arguably the unsuccessful attempts to establish the Bank of Ireland point to a failed financial revolution in Ireland. This failure will be located within the wider context of the general crisis of the financial revolution that followed the collapse of the Mississippi and South Sea Schemes in 1720-21.

Affiliation

Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Publications

Thirty original and co-authored entries in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, including Joseph Addison, John Harding, William Conolly, Thomas Burgh & John Pratt, (Cambridge University Press, 2009 forthcoming)

"Club Life in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries". In James Kelly & Martyn Powell (eds.), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1690-1800 (forthcoming, 2009)

Union Calendar of the Conolly of Castletown Papers, c.1660-c.1940, co-edited with Anthony Malcomson (Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2008 forthcoming)

Castletown, Co. Kildare (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2007)

"'Permanent Tranquillity Will not be Established While the Present System is Continued': Charles James Fox and Ireland, 1801-1803". In Anne Dolan, Patrick Geoghegan & Darryl Jones (eds.), Reinterpreting Emmet: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Robert Emmet (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007), pp. 39-55

"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: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2005), pp. 324-330

"The Sin of With-Holding Tribute: Contemporary Pamphlets and the Professionalization of the Irish Revenue Service in the Early Eighteenth Century". Eighteenth Century Ireland 21 (2006): 48-65