"A due circulation in the veins of the publick": imagining credit in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.(Tribute issue to Professor J. Douglas Canfield, University of Arizona)

Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, September, 2005 by Glaisyer, Natasha

"I am to speak of what all People are busie about, but not one in Forty understands: Every Man has a Concern in it, few know what it is, nor is it easy to define or describe it. If a Man goes about to explain it by Words, he rather struggles to lose himself in the Wood, rather than bring others out of it." (1)

In 1695 Charles Davenant, the political arithmetician, observed that the "whole Art of War is in a manner reduced to Money." (2) Indeed, the financial costs of England's extensive military activities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were enormous and dominated public spending. To sustain such spending, borrowing was undertaken on a massive scale--most prominently, from 1694, through the Bank of England. Such developments--alongside the...

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