Casualties of Credit

This book provides an elegant, engaging, and highly compelling account of the ways in which credit emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as topic of discussion and focus of economic innovation. -- Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland, Galway Credit makes the world go around but, as recent events have shown, it can also bring it crashing down. By revealing credit's perilous partners in early modern England, among them alchemy, slavery, and death, Carl Wennerlind's richly documented study boldly revises the cultural history of the Financial Revolution and puts our current calamities into a salutary long-term perspective. -- David Armitage, author of The Ideological Origins of the British Empire This excellent and ambitious book demonstrates how the need to expand credit dominated much of the thinking about the economy in England from the 1620s onward. Wennerlind puts the so-called Hartlib school of the Commonwealth period firmly at the center of a shift in thinking about credit and money in relation to the productive capacity of the economy and poverty. An eloquently written and timely reminder that credit and economic growth have always been inseparable but restless bedfellows. -- Craig Muldrew, Queen's College, University of Cambridge Carl Wennerlind has written a timely and important book explaining why England forged a financial revolution that not only allowed it to become the leading imperial power but also the first industrial nation. Wennerlind shows that state activity was central to overcoming England's financial limitations. But that state activity in turn depended on innovations in scientific understanding. Ideas were central to explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the new world of finance. Based on exhaustive research, but written in a lively and engaging style, Wennerlind demonstrates that economic affairs should never be treated separately from political, scientific, or moral debates. No one interested in the origins of the modern world, or in the contemporary debt crisis, should miss this book. -- Steven Pincus, Yale University

With a circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet this new system of credit was precarious and prone to accidents, and it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence.

Modern credit, developed during the financial revolution of 1620–1720, laid the foundation for England’s political, military, and economic dominance in the eighteenth century. Possessed of a generally circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear in its foes and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet a number of casualties followed in the wake of this new system of credit. Not only was it precarious and prone to accidents, but it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence.

Carl Wennerlind reconstructs the intellectual context within which the financial revolution was conceived. He traces how the discourse on credit evolved and responded to the Glorious Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the founding of the Bank of England, the Great Recoinage, armed conflicts with Louis XIV, the Whig–Tory party wars, the formation of the public sphere, and England’s expanded role in the slave trade. Debates about credit engaged some of London’s most prominent turn-of-the-century intellectuals, including Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift and Christopher Wren. Wennerlind guides us through these conversations, toward an understanding of how contemporaries viewed the precariousness of credit and the role of violence—war, enslavement, and executions—in the safeguarding of trust.