This colloquium, the
sixth in a biennial series and the first to be held in Belgium, offers an
opportunity for scholars from a variety of disciplines to enrich their mutual
understanding of the intersections between public finance, politics and print during
Britain’s ‘financial revolution’.
The term ‘Britain’ is
used loosely to refer to all constituent parts of the United Kingdom and also
to Ireland and the colonies.
The organizers invite
proposals for papers that will build on the three papers already contributed
and the two contemporary publications they have chosen for discussion in an
opening-day session. Ideally, submissions should develop ideas in, or comment
upon issues raised by, one or more of the papers or readings already included in
the program.
Abstracts of the organizers’
three papers are printed below. The contemporary publications to be discussed
are:
Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and
Necessity of a Paper-Currency. Philadelphia, 1729. Reprinted in Leonard W.
Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 139-157.
Dr. William Douglass, A Discourse Concerning the Currencies
of the British Plantations in America. Boston, 1740. Reprinted in Andrew
McFarland Davis, ed., Colonial Currency Reprints, 1682-1751, Vol. III
(New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1964), vol. 3, pp. 305-363.
Proposals
are welcome in any of four general areas:
- the mechanics of the ‘financial revolution’ itself —
the operations, theoretical and practical, of institutions such as banks,
joint-stock companies, public debt and paper money;
- the effect of diverse understandings of emerging
financial instruments and theories upon contemporary political debate as
demonstrated in the literature and legislative debates of the period;
- the influence of the successes and failures of specific
legislative and / or financial proposals on the development of political
and economic programs throughout this period;
- the impact of literature and legislative debates of the
period on people’s perceptions of the financial revolution and/or its
political consequences;
Submissions should clearly demonstrate connections between as
many as possible of the three themes of the colloquium: money, power and print. The term ‘Money’ is used
broadly to cover the core economic components of the financial revolution. By ‘Power, ‘ we mean
the contest between royalty, aristocracy, gentry, merchants and financiers for
influence and standing. ‘Print’ is taken to mean the ways by which the consequences
of the interplay of money and power were explained, analyzed, explicated,
advocated for or railed against, and misrepresented (whether deliberately or
not) in newspapers, pamphlets, novels, plays, illustrations, and other printed
material intended for circulation.
Consideration should be given
to the degree to which the print material under discussion shaped the
implementation of financial policies and influenced political discourse.
Papers will be
distributed weeks in advance and presented in 2-hour sessions at which all
colloquium participants are present. Presenters will have five minutes to
summarize their findings. The rest of each session will be given over to questions
and discussion, in which the goal is to enrich our mutual understanding by
eliciting insights from all of the disciplines represented at the table.
Authors are therefore expected to write for a non-specialist audience, avoiding
jargon, making concepts from their own discipline readily accessible to all
those present, seeking to identify areas of general interest, and focusing on
questions on which scholars of various disciplines will have something to
contribute.
Graduate students and
emerging scholars are particularly encouraged to submit proposals.
Initial expressions of interest of 250 words or less are due no
later than 15 June 2013. Earlier submissions are
encouraged. Those whose initial proposals seem likely to be a good fit for the
colloquium will be asked to get a full draft to the conference organizers by 15
December 2013. The final decision about which papers to include will be made in
mid-February 2014 and the program will be published shortly thereafter.
Abstracts
of the organizers’ papers:
British public
finance during the War of the Spanish Succession: a quality theory of money
Previous
studies of the various debt instruments extant in the British system of public
finance in the early eighteenth century (navy bills, tallies, Exchequer bills,
annuities, short- and long-term corporate loans, etc.) approach them
principally from a quantitative angle: as efforts to bridge the mathematical
gap between revenues and expenditures. But much can be gained by focusing
instead on their qualitative features. The fundamental problem of British
public finance at this time was not revenue shortfalls per se but an inadequate
supply of what contemporaries called ‘ready money’ — principally gold and
silver specie. In many ways the system’s history can be viewed as a series of
efforts to supply new close substitutes for ready money or force existing
specie supplies through the Exchequer in greater proportion and/or with greater
frequency. The paper focuses on Exchequer bills, South Sea stock, and lotteries
as projects of this kind.
‘Financial Necessity is the Mother of
Fiscal Invention’: Innovation and imitation in the
financial practices of the Irish government and parliament in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
This paper examines the
extent to which the Irish government and parliament engaged in innovative
financial practices or imitated those of England and elsewhere in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the extent to which the focus
and content of that engagement was dictated by a struggle for political and
economic power between the executive and legislative arms of government. The
paper starts with an overview of various financial innovations and imitations,
such as the 1660s Customs and Excise acts, the 1690s adoption of parliamentary
additional duties, the creation of a parliament-sanctioned national debt in
1716, and the failed national bank proposal of 1721. The main focus will be the
extent to which the growing public debt led to experimentation in the 1710s and
1720s with forms of paper credit circulation through the use of warrants for
army pay that was in arrears. In so doing, the paper will look to assess the
level of understanding of accepted fiscal policy of the time evident in these
endeavours and to consider whether or not the managers of the Irish public
finances were rather reluctant, and indeed possibly somewhat desperate,
innovators.
Why Cato?
This paper explores how
the prominence of the ‘Cato’ meme and its replacement by competitors such ‘Britannicus or ‘True Born Englishman’ illuminates particular aspects of
early eighteenth-century English political discourse. Cato’ became a public
figure after such works as Sir William Temple’s ‘On Ancient and Modern Learning’
and Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books brought the ‘ancients vs. moderns’ debate to a general audience. The meme reached its
zenith in the idealization of Joseph Addison’s Cato and culminated in
John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters. The adoption as a
public pseudonym of a moral authority and suicide who had failed in his time to
prevent a perceived social decline indicates the depth of the rupture
identified by the new nostalgics. Their work identifies a profound social
breach stressed by writers for whom the Restoration was a disappointment, James
II ghastly, William ineffectual, and Anne too little too late. As the death of
Anne approached and the new constitutional order appeared irrevocable, ‘Cato’
served as an ideal pseudonym, allowing for an oppositional stance that was neither
Jacobite nor republican. Yet, even as Cato was being staged, broader
recognition of the inevitability of the new fiscal-social polity was
increasingly apparent in publications by authors such as the ‘True Born
Englishmen’. ‘Cato’ in the early eighteenth century was as cognizant of his end
as had been his original namesake.