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CHAPTER 8 Sir Josiah Child: What Price Money? Sir William Petty (1623–1687) and Sir Josiah Child (1630–1699) both came from minor mercantile families. Each, measured by the wealth he left behind, proved to be an excellent businessman. But, whereas Petty pushed himself out of those limited socio-intellectual con‹nes into the ranks of the scienti‹c innovators and the landowning elite, Child stayed closer to home, keeping his ideas and his portfolio trained on East India Company shares. He bought land, of course; most of the merchant magnates did, but that retirement villa had little impact on his economic thought.1 The difference in their lives tells in their thought. While Petty explored questions of taxes, land, labor, monetary velocity, value added, and the basic nature of wealth, Child remained ‹xed on the problem of money. He wished to have the legal interest rate lowered from 6 to 4 percent. He argued that lower interest rates created greater prosperity, but refused to consider the reciprocal effect of prosperity on the interest rate because he could not accept that there was a true market in money. He still thought of money as an exogenous variable, as something of independent value. The popularity of his works attests to that of his views.2 When Charles I and Parliament raised opposing armies in 1642, the established merchants of London, like the rest of the citizenry, had to choose sides. The members of the older European and East Indies companies tended to favor the cause of Charles I, while the members of the newer colonial companies favored that of Parliament,3 though Edward Misselden ’s problems prove the lines could be crossed.The generation that followed Misselden and Mun had a choice to make as well: exile (in the form of service in the great company trading posts abroad) or making their way in Parliamentarian England. Not all perhaps were as assiduous as Child, the former merchant’s apprentice, in making his way in that new world. From a minor navy supplier in 1650, he rose steadily to the positions of deputy to the Navy’s treasurer at Portsmouth (1653), burgess (1655), mayor’s assistant (1656), and mayor (1658) of Portsmouth.4 Letters from Child or 130 concerning his activities in the State Papers of the Commonwealth present a picture of a man who would have well understood the expression “Cover your ass.” He was forever querying the Navy commissioners for explicit authorizations to victual some ship on credit or support some crew whose ship was waiting passage out.5 He was also very careful with his own pocketbook ; faced with an unexpectedly large in›ux of Spanish prisoners in May 1659, he doled out only 2p. worth of coarse bread out of an authorized 4p. per man per day maintenance to avoid having to dip into his own funds.6 The Restoration might have written ‹nis to his budding career, but scorned by the Navy in 1661 and removed from the Portsmouth Corporation by the new regime in 1662, Child cultivated the friendship of Samuel Pepys and his cousin Sir Edward Montagu (afterward Earl of Sandwich) and was well on his way to restoring his fortunes by 1665.7 He imported timber from New England to sell to the Navy and bought himself a brewery in Southwark to make it possible for him to keep more of the pro‹ts from selling the Navy its beer. Parliamentary investigations into naval affairs after the second Dutch War ended in 1667 led to calls for the replacement of the Navy Board Commissioners . Child’s appointment was enthusiastically supported by Buckingham (a “Whig”), but this, and Child’s status as “a merchant” set the future James II (then Duke of York and High Admiral) “stoutly” against him.8 James was eqully fed up with the merchant members (Child amongst them) of the Council of Trade on which the Duke also sat. Some of those merchants, like John Shorter, Thomas Papillon, and John Page, held Presbyterian or Congregationalist sentiments. Shorter and his fellow “Whiggish ” Council members Thomas Papillon and John Page had, at various times, been Child’s business partners.9 Child’s own religious sentiments seem to have been broadly tolerationist, and his pamphlets even supported Jewish immigration (on economic grounds). But he was as quick as any man of his century to see sectarian skeletons in every closet, going so far in his New Discourse of Trade as to suggest that men...

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