Participants

Michael Brown

Chair, Session VI

Affiliation

Department of History, University of Aberdeen

Publications

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

The Irish and the Law, 1650-1850 (ed. with Sean Patrick Donlan). Farnham: Ashgate Press, forthcoming

Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850 (ed. with Charles Ivar McGrath and Thomas Power). Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008

The Irish Act of Union: Bicentennial Essays (ed. with Patrick M. Geoghegan and James Kelly). Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003

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

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

Dwight Codr

Observer

Affiliation

Department of English, Tulane University

Alexander Deguise

Murders, Riots and Horse Slayings: Portrayals of John Law's Monetary System in the London Press

Abstract

Throughout 1719 and 1720, events in Paris related to John Law and his monetary system regularly occupied a prominent place in many of the London journals. The scope of this paper is to explore the accounts contained in four weekly journals of three events related to Law's system. All four of these journals assumed that there was a significant hunger amongst their readerships for what we might call "economic information," although the information they deemed relevant were not simply facts about prices. Narratives about riots and murders, for example, were considered relevant by each of these journals for determining the successes and failures of Law's system. Expositions of political information were also deemed relevant, and each journal would include discussions about the political ramifications of Law's system. What is most striking about the descriptions contained in these journals however is the emphasis placed on 'crowds' and 'public opinion.' This suggests that English commentators recognized that the 'public' had some political power at this early stage in the development of a discourse of 'public' finance.

Affiliation

Department of History, McGill University

Publications

Defoe's Review and the language of eighteenth-century economic information. MA thesis, McGill University, 2009

Alan Downie

Chair, Session IV

Affiliation

Goldsmiths College, University of London

Publications

A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009)

Henry Fielding In Our Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary Conference. Editor (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)

"Periodicals, the Book Trade and the 'Bourgeois Public Sphere'". Media Histor 14 (2008):261-274

Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (paperback reprint ed., Cambridge University Press, 2008)

"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 II

Affiliation

British Museum

Publications

With A. Manolopoulou. Paper Money of England and Wales. (Online Research Catalogue, British Museum, 2009 forthcoming)

With S. Davis (eds.). Multiply: The Francis Hookham Collection of Pocket Electronic Calculators (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 2009 forthcoming)

With H. Fuller and J. Perkins (eds.). Money in Africa (London: British Museum Research Publications, 2009)

"Designs on decimal coins: Christopher Ironside". In K. Clancy (ed.), Designing Change: the art of coin design(Llantrisant: Royal Mint, 2008), pp. 22-37

"More than just exhibitions of coins: the 21st-century money museum and its audiences", Proceedings of the meeting of ICOMON in San José, Costa Rica, October 2005 (San José: Central Bank of Costa Rica, 2008)

With J. Williams (eds.). Money: A History. 2nd ed. (London: British Museum Press, 2007)

With R. Kelleher. "1343 and all that. Previously unnoticed documents relating to England's new gold and silver coins", British Numismatic Journal 76 (2006):340-44

Christopher Fauske

Chair, Session VIII

Affiliation

Communications Department, Salem State College, Salem, MA

Publications

"A System Illusory and Immoral: Jonathan Swift and the Emergence of the Modern Economic Polity". In Robert Balfour (ed.), Speculation and Displacement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

"On Being Orthodox: The Sermons of Laurence Sterne and the Church of England Context." In W. B. Gerard (ed.), Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming), pp. 45-62.

"John Frederick MacNeice". In James McGuire et al. (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

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)

"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), pp. 135-56

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

"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

Iain Frame

Observer

Affiliation

Harvard Law School, Harvard University

Natasha Glaisyer

Chair, Session VII

Affiliation

Department of History, University of York

Publications

“Calculating Credibility: Print Culture, trust and economic figures in early eighteenth-century England”, Economic History Review 60 (2007)

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

“‘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)

“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

Joyce Goggin

Observer

Affiliation

Literature, Film and New Media, University of Amsterdam; and Head of Studies, Amsterdam University College

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 (SUNY Press, forthcoming)

"The Diamond Standard: Money, Film Culture and the Experience Economy". In Joachim Frenk and Christian Krug (eds.) The Cultures of James Bond (forthcoming)

"The Dark Knight: Free-Play, Counter-Play and the Manufactured Middle". In Jack Post (ed.) Counter-Play (AUP, forthcoming)

"Of Gutters and Guttersnipes: Hogarth's Legacy". In Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest (eds.), Out of the Gutter: Reading Comic Books and Graphic Novels (McFarland, forthcoming)

"My Future's so Bright, I'm already Dead". Ed. Thomas Bay (Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, forthcoming)

"Fantasy and Finance: What Play Money Does in Game Worlds". In The Computer Culture Reader (Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 125-37

"A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading Like a Sim". In G. F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski (eds.), The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 205-23

"Casinos and Sure Bets: Ocean's Eleven and Cinematic Money". In Money and Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 285-97

"Gaming/Gambling: Addiction and the Videogame Experience". In Melanie Swalwell and Jason Wilson (eds.), The Pleasures of Computer Gaming (Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2008), pp. 33-52

"Jane Austen Reloaded: Portraits and Adaptations". Persuasions On-Line (2007)

"Architectural Space, Cyber Bodies and the Literary Text: A Voyage through Neuromancer". Essenses 13.1 (2006):5-23

"Corpus Simsi: Or Can a Body Tell a Story?". Public 34 (December 2006):110-14

"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

"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

Observer

Affiliation

University of Delaware and NBER Research Associate

Publications

"Testing for the Economic Impact of the U.S. Constitution: Purchasing Power Parity across the Colonies Versus across the States, 1748-1811". Journal of Economic History 70.1 (Mar. 2010):118-145

"U.S. Land Policy: Founding Choices and Outcomes, 1781-1802". In Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla (eds.), Founding Choices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and NBER, 2010)

"Money Supply in the American Colonies". In Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

"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

Richard Kleer

Chair, Session III

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 V

Affiliation

Research Fellow, Centre for Cross Border Studies, Armagh

Publications

"Frank Aiken (1898-1981): last of the Sinn Féiners". In Michael Kennedy and Rory Miller, Frank Aiken and Foreign Policy (forthcoming)

"Regulating the market: parliament, corn and bread in eighteenth-century Ireland". In Michael Brown and Sean Donlon (eds.), The boundaries of the law (forthcoming)

"Clubs and societies in eighteenth-century Belfast". In James Kelly and Martyn Powell (eds.), Clubs and societies ... eighteenth-century Ireland (forthcoming)

With Steve MacFeely and Aidan Gough, "Cross-Border Shopping in Ireland: addressing the myths". Journal of Cross Border Studies 5 (2010)

"Selected document: Present state of Ireland, 1749". Irish Historical Studies (Nov 2009)

"Writing the Political Economy of 18th century Ireland: A Review Article". European Journal of Economic Thought(June 2009)

With Aidan Gough. "Devolution in everyday life: the case of cross-border commerce". IBIS Working Papers No.74 (2009)

"Money, Banks and Politics in Ireland in the 1730s". In Charles Ivar McGrath and Chris Fauske (eds.), Money, Power and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008)

"The Presbyterian revolutions in South Ulster, 1690-1780". Seanchas Ard Mhacha 21:2 (2007)

Edited with A.F. Blackstock, Politics and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: Essays in Tribute to Peter Jupp(Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2007)

"The Hearts of Steel and Agrarian Crowds in the Armagh/Down Borderland in 1772". In A.F. Blackstock and Eoin Magennis (eds.), Politics and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: Essays in Tribute to Peter Jupp (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2007)

"Shadow or Substance?: North/South cooperation and the 'Common Chapter', 2000-2006". In John Coakley and Liam O'Dowd (eds.), Crossing the Border (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007)

With Michael Kennedy, "North/South agenda setting in the 1960s and 1990s: Plus ça change?". Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland 2 (2007):34-53

Articles on Lord Kildare, Archbishop George Stone, Henry Boyle (Lord Shannon), Archbishop Richard Robinson and Richard Barton. In New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2006)

With Joseph Shiels and Patricia Clarke, "Is North/South cooperation working?: Some lessons from Border Ireland". Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland 1 (2006):20-33

Debates over Ireland and the First World War (ed. with Crónán ;Oacute; 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)

C. Ivar McGrath

Chair, Orientation Session

Affiliation

School of History and Archives, University College Dublin

Publications

People, Politics and Power: Essays on Irish History 1660-1850 in Honour of James I. McGuire. Edited with James Kelly and John McCafferty (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009)

"Alan Brodrick and the Speakership of the Irish House of Commons, 1703-4". In Kelly, McCafferty and McGrath (eds.), People, Politics and Power (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009), pp. 70-93

"The 'Union' Representation of 1703 in the Irish House of Commons: a case of mistaken identity?". Eighteenth-Century Ireland 23 (2008):11-35

Money, Power and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles. Edited with Christopher Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008)

"The Irish Experience of 'Financial Revolution', 1660-1760". In McGrath and Fauske (eds.), Money, Power and Print (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 157-88

"Government, parliament and the constitution: the reinterpretation of Poynings' Law, 1692-1714". Irish Historical Studies 35 (2006-7):160-72

Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850. Edited with Michael Brown and T. P. Power (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005)

"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, 2005), pp. 35-59

"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), pp. 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

John Dryden and sovereign default risk: literature, publicity and the creation of confidence in Charles II's reign

Abstract

This paper will argue that John Dryden's poems Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal, works defending the monarchy during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, were not only about the controversy over the religious preference of the successor to King Charles II, but also about restoring confidence in the wake of England's sovereign default of 1672, the "Stop of the Exchequer." It will argue that the Old Testament allegory of Absalom and Achitophel was targeting London's goldsmiths, the principal lenders to the King, as the main financial backers of the exclusion movement. In explaining this sovereign default, this paper will also contend that the Financial Revolution began long before post-1688 innovations in public finance such as the founding of the Bank of England. It will also argue that these poems partook of a century-long discourse on the social contract that the Stuart dynasty's poor record of repaying public creditors had generated. It will make the claim that these poems encapsulate the discourse on the social contract in their process of asserting that there are no private property rights without the sovereignty of the public sector. It will do so by focusing on coin imagery in the poems, contending that legal tender was considered a public responsibility in the period and that Dryden was shifting blame for the default away from the king by suggesting that the clipping of coin by the goldsmiths to whom the debt was owed was a sovereignty violation that undermined the social contract from the private end. This discussion of blame shifting will support a general argument that Dryden, as a principal information officer for King Charles, was attempting to manage public perceptions of sovereign default risk and building confidence in the King and his finances in the wake of the Stop of the Exchequer. By contending that the Exclusion Crisis was a form of revolution-in-the-making that stemmed from the Stop, it will thereby consider Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal as potentially counter-revolutionary works that attempted to defer perceptions of sovereign default risk into the future.

Affiliation

English Department, University of New Hampshire

Publications

Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010 forthcoming)

Special Issue Editor, "Ireland and Enlightenment". Eighteenth-Century Studies (Fall 2010 forthcoming)

"Devouring Posterity: A Modest Proposal, Empire, and Ireland's 'Debt of the Nation'". PMLA 122.3 (May 2007):679-695

"Swift and Ireland's Revenue: the Public Finance Context of Irish Economic Pamphleteering". In Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth M&uumlaut;enster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 391-401

"'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):69-52

"The Culture of Paper Credit: the New Economic Criticism and the Postcolonial Eighteenth Century", The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45.2 (Summer 2004):87-108

"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): 26-56

"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

The Grand Palladium of Public Credit: the Bank of England during the later eighteenth century

Abstract

In 1783 the Bank of England appointed a Committee of Inspection to examine the working practices of its departments and identify any failings in procedures. The Committee interviewed almost all the Bank's servants from the lowliest clerk to the chief cashier and chief accountant. Employees were asked about their duties, working hours, pay and conditions and they were quizzed about their relationships with their colleagues. The Minutes record many answers in full thus the document offers a comprehensive record of the various aspects of the Bank's business. It details the management of the national debt, records procedures for the discounting of bills of exchange, printing and issuance of notes, and the management of the cash and customer accounts. The report also details the Bank's security measures, staffing and management problems and outlines the measures recommended by the Committee to improve efficiency and security. The conclusion of the report presents the inspectors' view of the Bank's position in the British economy and admits a 'religious Veneration for the glorious fabrick [of the Bank and a] steady and unremitting attention to its sacred Preservation'.

This paper will explain the reasons why there was a need for such a detailed report on the Bank's working practices at this time and, in particular, will seek to link the Bank's audit with other contemporary enquiries into the management of Britain's finances and related institutions. These included the appointment of a board of Commissioners for examining the Public Accounts in 1780 and the appointment of a Board of Control at the East India Company in 1784. In this way the paper will seek to show how the political debate about the potentially disastrous consequences of the mismanagement of the public finances shaped the Bank's understanding of its business and its role as a financial and political institution. It will also consider whether this report should be seen as an attempt by the Bank to 'put its house in order' so as to preclude any attempts to impose political control over its business.

Affiliation

School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire

Publications

"Learning the business of banking: the recruitment and training of the Bank of England's first tellers". Business History (forthcoming)

The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation Before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

"Trading options before Black-Scholes: a study of the market in late seventeenth-century London". Economic History Review 62, S1 (2009):8-30

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

"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

Helen Julia Paul

Archibald Hutcheson and the South Sea Bubble

Abstract

Archibald Hutcheson MP was one of the few contemporaries who wrote about the South Sea Bubble in detailed financial terms. Many commentators simply blamed general causes such as greed, folly or 'jobbing'. Hutcheson was at the centre of the enquiry into the 1720 crash. He has been lauded as a savant and unsung hero of the Bubble. His ideas have permeated the secondary literature of the episode. However, on closer inspection many of his economic ideas are incorrect. Later authors have only selected those statements which fitted with modern viewpoints. A broader selection of his statements in the House of Commons and political writings shows a different picture. Hutcheson was not a financier, but he was one of the first to try to make sense of the Bubble using financial arguments. His work gives great insight into the contemporary social and political context. Ironically, it is not particularly useful with regard to financial theory. This paper will use his writings to show his confused and contradictory approach to the stock market and its participants. Hutcheson struggled to understand the financial innovations and changing social structure which accompanied them. He was a participant in the stock market, but also part of the landed elite. The South Sea Bubble was one of the highpoints of his career. He reminded the public of this with a slew of pamphlets. There is a selection bias in the survival of ephemera from country house libraries. Hutcheson's reputation is in need of revision.

Affiliation

Economics Division, University of Southampton, Southampton, England

Publications

The South Sea Bubble: an economic history of its origin and consequences (Routledge, 2010 forthcoming)

"Royal Africa Company". In Encyclopaedia of Business in Today's World (Sage, 2009)

"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, 2008)

"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)

George Selgin

Those dishonest goldsmiths

Abstract

Modern accounts of the origins of fractional-reserve banking, in economics textbooks and elsewhere, often assert that London goldsmiths came up with the idea around the middle of the 17th century, and first implemented it by clandestinely lending coin that they were supposed to keep locked away in their vaults. I examine the veracity of this claim by examining contemporary, circumstantial evidence bearing upon it, and also by considering the circumstances under which, according to English legal doctrines at the time in question, goldsmiths were entitled to lend coin that had been surrendered to them. I conclude that the goldsmiths were almost certainly innocent of the crime for which they are so frequently accused, and that the accusation may well have taken shape through later writers' confusion of (1) crimes other than embezzlement of which goldsmiths were accused by their contemporaries and (2) documented embezzlements of stored coin, not by goldsmiths but either by the British crown or by merchants' servants.

Affiliation

Terry College of Business, University of Georgia

Publications

"The Institutional Roots of Great Britain's 'Big Problem of Small Change'". European Review of Economic History, forthcoming

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821(Ann Arbor and Oakland: University of Michigan Press and The Independent Institute, 2008)

"Charles Wyatt, Manager of the Parys Mine Mint: A Study in Ingratitude". British Numismatic Journal 75 (2005):113-20

"Steam, Hot Air, and Small Change: Matthew Boulton and the Reform of Britain's Coinage". Economic History Review 56 (August 2003):478-509

"The Suppression of State Bank Notes: A Reconsideration". Economic Inquiry 38 (October 2000):600-15

"A Fiscal Theory of Governments' Role in Money". With L. H. White. Economic Inquiry (January 1999):154-65

"The Check Tax: Fiscal Folly and the Great Monetary Contraction". With William D. Lastrapes. Journal of Economic History 57 (December 1997):859-78

Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy. London: Institute of Economic Affairs Occasional Paper, 1997

"The Option Clause in Scottish Banking". With L.H. White. Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 29 (May 1997):270-73

"Salvaging Gresham's Law: the Good, the Bad, and the Illegal". Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 28 (November 1996):637-649

"How Would the Invisible Hand Handle Money?". With L. H. White. Journal of Economic Literature 32 (1994):1718-1749

The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply under Competitive Note Issue (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, l988)

"The Evolution of a Free Banking System". With L. H. White. Economic Inquiry 25 (l987):439-57

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

Observer

Affiliation

School of History and Archives, University College Dublin

Publications

"Biography and the meaning of an Irish Country House: William Conolly and Castletown". In Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgeway (eds.), The Irish country house: its past, present and future (Dublin, 2010 forthcoming)

The Making of the Ascendancy: William Conolly, 1689-1729 (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 2010 forthcoming)

"A new Edmund Burke letter from 1778". Eighteenth century Ireland 24 (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 (2010 forthcoming)

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)

"The South Sea Bubble: a parable for our own time". History Ireland 17.2 (March/April 2009)

The Conolly Papers, co-edited with Anthony Malcomson (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2009)

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

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

Courtney Weiss Smith

Money Matters: the Nature of Money in the English Recoinage Crisis

Abstract

This gathering addresses itself to the question of "how the intrusion of new economic institutions changed the parameters of public discourse and high-level political decision-making." My paper argues that many of the English writers struggling with issues of money and value in the 1690s understood the natural world, in itself, to change or direct "the parameters of public discourse and high-level political decision-making." Nature offered these writers concrete clues about the proper ways to order their economies, even about God's will for human economies. I focus on the debates surrounding the English recoinage crisis. Significantly, I demonstrate that a natural logic structured all three of the most important positions on recoinage&emdash;the conservative position privileging bullion as well as the more innovative suggestions that are often read as proto-capitalist. Economic thinkers of all stripes investigated particular material realities like the properties of bullion as they attempted to approximate in their policy proposals an order they believed was much larger than themselves. Money mattered, in every sense of the word.

Affiliation

English Department, Washington University in St. Louis

Publications

Empirical possibilities: close attention to material things in England, 1690-1730". Ph.D. dissertation (April 2010)