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  • Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720
  • Brian Cowan
Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720. By Carl Wennerlind (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2011) 348 pp. $39.95

The last few years have seen a global “credit crunch” turn into a full-blown financial crisis, the total effects of which are only gradually becoming clear. Recent history thus makes Wennerlind’s new intellectual history of England’s long “financial revolution” of the seventeenth century of more than ordinary interest. The book describes the rise of credit as a concept that enabled financial innovation on a heretofore unprecedented scale in seventeenth-century England, criticizing some of the assumptions that lay behind this new orientation and thereby exposing the “casualties” of credit that give the book its name. Wennerlind links the history of credit with such diverse phenomena as alchemy, capital punishment, and slavery that have rarely been associated with it by previous historians.

Wennerlind’s book is both methodologically and chronologically innovative. He uses intellectual history to illuminate a topic more often explored by social and economic historians. Although John Greville Agard Pocock gave the idea of credit a key place in The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), and literary historians have explored the place of credit in the early modern imagination, the financial revolution has been studied mainly as the product of social, political, and, above all, economic changes during the late seventeenth century. Wennerlind does not simply use the work of financial historians to illuminate the idea of credit; he uses the intellectual history of credit to rethink the concept of the financial revolution itself. In so doing, he demonstrates that the expansion of credit, and the financial revolution engendered by that expansion, had a much more complicated history than previous accounts have realized.

The payoff to this approach is a new chronological perspective on the financial revolution. Although some historians have posited the origins [End Page 480] of the dramatic expansion of English finance capital during the 1690s to the Restoration or the mid-century civil-war era, few have been so bold as to trace them back to the 1620s, as Wennerlind does. The outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618, and the disastrous effects of William Cockayne’s ill-conceived project of banning English exports of unfinished cloth, created an economic crisis that stimulated a series of debates about how to solve the liquidity problems that stifled English trade. These debates led first to renewed interest in alchemy, since transforming base metals into gold would have alleviated the scarcity of money. Alchemy has received renewed prominence in the history of early modern science, but Wennerlind shows it to have played a key role in stimulating early modern financial innovation as well. The key figures were the thinkers and projectors associated with Samuel Hartlib in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Hartlib circle should now be recognized as a crucible for original economic thought, as well as for its social and political reform projects.

The financial revolution has traditionally been located firmly within the decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and often understood as a product of that revolution. This book devotes most of its attention to the years between the revolution and the collapse of the South Sea bubble during the early 1720s. Wennerlind outlines the expansion of government finance that the stability provided by regular parliaments after 1689 enabled, devoting much of the rest of his account to exploring the additional ideological work required to make the growth of credit acceptable. This work included attempts to ensure that forgery would be punished as a felonious capital offense, and a curious silence with regard to the condition of enslaved people in the debates about the expansion of the South Sea Company into the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Casualties of Credit does not offer a complete history of the seventeenth-century financial revolution; its broad purview prevents Wennerlind from exploring his topics in minute detail. Hence, the reader is often left wanting further discussion of the many themes addressed in passing. Nevertheless, the book manages to offer insights into several key, and often unexplored, conceptual connections that can...

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