Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial Subject by Natalie Roxburgh (review)

Natalie Roxburgh. Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial Subject. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Pp. x + 206. £110; £35.99 (ebook)

The seventeenth century in Britain ended with titanic twin revolutions: an (allegedly) glorious political revolution, which changed both the ruling dynasty and the governing constitution, and a financial revolution that allowed the newly minted King William III to borrow the money to wage an extended and costly war against his cousin Louis XIV. Drawing on a substantial body of existing scholarship in political and economic history, the history of ideas, and literary scholarship, Representing Public Credit explores the claim that these institutional changes were accompanied by changes in the mentality of eighteenth-century subjects. In order to function properly, modern politics and finance require credit to adopt a series of beliefs: that a government will pay its debts, that a bank can remain solvent despite keeping only a fraction of its deposits as reserves, that disinterested recordkeeping can create scientific truth, that individual subjects together can constitute a "public sphere" capable of holding kings and parliaments to account. For Ms. Roxburgh, eighteenth-century literature is the imaginative technology that makes the modern "financial subject" possible.

Representing Public Credit develops this claim through a historical introduction to eighteenth-century political economy followed by chapters on Defoe, both as journalist and novelist; Pamela and Clarissa; it-narratives; and David Simple and Evelina. Thus The Compleat Tradesman is a parable of what the English government must do to regain trust after the South Sea Bubble, for instance, while Pamela Andrews and the Bank of England share the problem of convincing auditors that their books are balanced. Ms. Roxburgh observes that it-narratives such as The Adventures of a Guinea educated readers about the workings of money throughout the economy and social structure, while sentimental novels by Fielding and Burney express nostalgia for a pre-modern economy of relationships rather than impersonal transactions.

Representing Public Credit began as a doctoral dissertation, and it retains both the virtues and vices of that crucial but sometimes unwieldy academic genre. To eighteenth-century scholars working in the paradigm of the New Economic Criticism, its bibliography will be a gold mine: Ms. Roxburgh points her reader to excellent scholarship across the history of British finance and political economy in addition to engaging with influential recent work on economic themes in literary studies. Representing Public Credit does an excellent job of choosing its interlocutors. Yet it cannot always escape from the shadow of a handful of particularly influential recent critics, particularly Michael McKeon (who advised the dissertation on which it is based) and Mary Poovey. This study is clear-eyed about entering what is "admittedly … a crowded field," but struggles in places to advance that field with clear, confident, and novel claims of its own.

Its handling of the fundamental, indeed titular, concept of "credible commitment" provides one representative example. The introduction opens by invoking the influential argument of the neo-institutionalist economists Douglass North and Barry Weingast that the post-Revolution settlement allowed England to borrow money cheaply and hence wage war effectively because its parliamentary monarchy could make a credible commitment to potential lenders not to default (unlike the Bourbons, who paid higher interest rates because of their frequent bankruptcies). But thirty pages later, the book acknowledges that North and Weingast's thesis has received serious challenges: James MacDonald argues that stable parliamentary government dates not to the Revolution but to the rise of Walpole, while Anne Murphy credits not Parliament but the print sphere in compelling William, Anne, and George I to honor their debts. (Indeed, Roxburgh does not discuss a more fundamental challenge to North and Weingast's credible commitment thesis: Nathan Sussman and Yishay Yafeh's 2006 finding, published in the Journal of Economic History, that England did not in fact enjoy lower borrowing costs than...