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14. Charles Davenant and the Brave New World
- University of Michigan Press
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CHAPTER 14 Charles Davenant and the Brave New World Charles Davenant’s work presents us with our ‹nal variation on the efforts of seventeenth-century English writers to create a science of economics in support of their inherited value system. But Davenant’s chief concern was less with the values of the marketplace itself than with preventing those values from infecting society as a whole. He lived through a key turningpoint in England’s transition from “market economy” to “market society,” and he foretold a doom as dark as any by Cassandra.Whether or not he had reason for despair, he certainly had reason for concern. The decades straddling the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries saw the intersection of intellectual, constitutional, and ‹nancial revolutions in England whose resolutions were still in doubt. The struggle of the Whigs and Tories to preserve their differing understandings of the constitutional settlement and to control a king determined to bring England back into the Continental arena would end by turning Britain into a modern “‹scal-military” state more powerful than and very different from its Continental cousins.1 But no one could be certain of this during the hasty improvisations, false starts, and budget crises of the last Stuart reigns; just as no one could know which of the two emerging enlightenments—the sanctioned magisterial one led by Newton or the suspected radical one led by the likes of John Toland— would emerge victorious in the heady days at the end of the century when the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 let loose a ›ood of heterodox treatises. Even the more conservative elements of the Enlightenment were suspect. The attacks of men like George Berkeley (1685–1753) and Stilling›eet on the ideas of Locke and Newton were neither intended nor taken as merely intellectual disagreements. Bishop Berkeley ’s 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge saw “the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism and Irreligion” in Locke’s acceptance of “general ideas” and Newton’s work on “attraction.”2 Nor was it any easier to predict the ‹nancial future when every day saw a new experiment in public and private ‹nance—recoinages, tontines, annuities, national 219 banks, governmental lotteries, stock exchanges, and several different kinds of paper money.3 During King William’s War (1689–97) against France, government expenditure trebled (from under £2 million in 1688 to an average of £5–6 million per year from 1689 to 1702).4 Customs and the Excise could yield only so much even with more ef‹cient collection and record keeping; a land tax was added. On January 26, 1693, the government opened the subscription list for a £1 million tontine loan whose interest (10 percent through midsummer 1700 and 7 percent thereafter) was to be covered by new excise duties with provision to convert the individual subscriptions to single-life annuities at a ‹xed 14 percent.5 In March 1694, a further £1 million lottery (of £10 tickets at varying interest rates) was ›oated, only to be joined the next month by another £300,000 in 6 percent annuities.6 The Bank of England, established that same April by Parliament, was an attempt to bring some order into the patchwork of long- and short-term borrowing by which the government was keeping itself a›oat. The subscription list for the original £1,200,000 loan (paying 8 percent) was ‹lled within 10 days of its June 21 opening date, but the year was not even over before the government was drawing funds on the Bank far over its original limits, without eliminating any of the short-term mechanisms it had been intended to replace.7 The recoinage, the drastic de›ation caused by it, and the reaction of the foreign exchanges against it sent the whole package into a tailspin from which it almost did not recover.The Malt Lottery Loan of April 1697 was a “virtually complete failure,” and only the peace of September 1697 gave the government the breather it needed to pull in its belt and settle some of the short-term debts threatening to strangle it altogether.The debt load was staggering for a preindustrial society, with the national debt standing at £12.8 million in 1702 and the debt service on it consuming as much as 24 percent of the budget.8 The revenue demands of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) started up the whole cycle of improvisation once again. Good harvests...