- New Work on Money, Finance, and Thought in the Eighteenth Century
Everyone knows what happened during the English Financial Revolution. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, British merchants and politicians began to experiment with new forms of credit and finance: paper money, government bonds, banks, and insurance. By the end of the eighteenth century, these experiments had made Britain into a global military, mercantile, and industrial powerhouse. But, as always, credit came with costs. Besides a monumental national debt, from which Britain, and every other nation, has never recovered, the new finances changed fundamentally the way people thought about themselves and each other. No longer tied to traditional notions of rank [End Page 105] and merit, Britain’s business class moved freely (if sometimes hazardously) up and down the social ladder, buying and selling estates, government contracts, and parliamentary seats. The success of this class brought new theories of language and mind into vogue. Words, like money, were no longer tied to things. People, like states, could change.
This account of the Financial Revolution was first laid out in two highly influential books: The Great Transformation, by the cultural anthropologist Karl Polyani, published in 1944, and The Financial Revolution, by the historian P. G. M. Dickson, published in 1967. Both Polyani and Dickson were working within a long-standing intellectual tradition that sought to affirm and defend the very idea of “Enlightenment” that had grown up with the market society of the eighteenth century, but that during the middle decades of the twentieth century was perceived to be under threat. Polyani’s and Dickson’s accounts of the English financial revolution were, by the 1970s, so entrenched that the Cambridge historian J. G. A. Pocock only devoted a single chapter to it in his landmark 1975 book, The Machiavellian Moment. But Pocock also did something else: he made the English Financial Revolution into a skirmish in Europe’s long political struggle between the forces of aristocracy and democracy. Pocock argued that British philosophers, responding to the new language and identities finance produced, developed counter-models of social and political responsibility. Some advocated a new “civil society,” through which financial speculation and its attendant passions could be productively restrained. Others promoted a return to “civic virtue,” by which propertied men of proven merit were heralded as the legitimate arbiters of political power and social judgment.
That single chapter of The Machiavellian Moment had an enormous influence on the study of British literature and thought. In the mid 1990s—the last time money was such a popular topic in eighteenth-century studies—several important books used Pocock’s summary account of the English Financial Revolution as a historical touchstone for their interpretations of the period’s poetry and fiction. Colin Nicholson and Catherine Ingrassia showed how the Augustan poets and essayists made both the credit economy and the apparently limitless supply of objects, cultures, and identities that it made available, the brunt of an equally limitless satiric ire. Yet Pope, Swift, and Addison also had personal connections to the literary marketplace and the world of trade, so their tirades against the rising middle class were contradictory. Also, Sandra Sherman, Liz Bellamy, James Thompson, Catherine Gallagher, and Deirdre Lynch recalled that novelists were for the most part sympathetic to the speculative order. Their dependence on fiction as a mode of representation tied their livelihoods more directly to the literary market than the poets’. Literary fiction could acclimatize readers to new forms of “fictional” monetary exchange. But [End Page 106] this self-consciousness about fiction also allowed many prominent novelists, including Henry Fielding, Francis...