Performing public credit at the eighteenth-century Bank of England

Much is known about the negotiation of personal credit relationships during the eighteenth century. It has been noted how direct contact and observation allowed individuals to assess the creditworthiness of those with whom they had financial connections and to whom they might lend money. Much less is known about one of the most important credit relationships of the long eighteenth century: that between the state and its creditors. This article shows that investors could experience the performance of public credit at the Bank of England. By 1760 the Bank was the manager of nearly three-quarters of the state's debt and housed the main secondary market in that debt. Thus, it provided a place for public creditors, both current and potential, to attend and scrutinize the performance of the state's promises. The article demonstrates how the Bank acted to embody public credit through its architecture, internal structures, and imagery and through the very visible actions of its clerks and the technologies that they used to record ownership and transfer of the national debt. The Bank of England, by those means, allowed creditors to interrogate the financial stability and reputation of the state in the same ways that they could interrogate the integrity of a private debtor.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Historical Role of the European Shadow Banking System in the Development and Evolution of Our Monetary Institutions

When we hear about the 2008 Lehman Brothers crisis, immediately we relate it to the concept of "shadow banking system"; however, the credit intermediation involving lightly regulated entities and activities outside the traditional banking system are not new for the European Financial Systems, after all, many innovations developed in the past, were adopted by European nations and exported to the rest of the world (i.e. coinage and central banking), and European innovators unleashed several financial crises related to "shadowy" financial intermediaries (i.e. the Gebroeders de Neufville crisis of 1763). However, despite not many academics, legislators and regulators even agree on what "shadow banking" is, this latter does not refer exclusively to the functions of credit intermediation and maturity transformation. This concept also refers to the creation of assets such as digital media of exchange which are designed under the influence of Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics. This lack of a uniform definition of "shadow banking" has limited our regulatory efforts on key issues like the private money creation, a source of vulnerability in the financial system that, paradoxically, at the same time could result in an opportunity to renovate European institutions, heirs of the tradition of the Wisselbank and the Bank of England which, during the seventeenth century, faced monetary innovations and led the European monetary revolution that originated the current monetary and regulatory practices implemented around the world

The decline of the cape gentry, 1838 - 1900

The final ending of slavery in 1838 marked a radical break in the agrarian history of the Cape Colony. The liberated slaves could and did make use of the mobility that emancipation allowed them. This amounted to a real negotiation of the price of labour, for at various points in the nineteenth century the price of labour threatened the very profitability of farming. For the greater part of the century many landlords were led, in the words of one colonial official, ‘to look back…with something very like an envious eye, to the days in which slavery was tolerated by law, because then the slaveholder could command labour whenever it was needed.’For the former slaveowners, the outcome was agricultural innovation and routine insolvency, and merchants came to have an increasingly important role in the rural political economy. But post-emancipation agrarian structures were not merely shaped by the incursion of merchant capital and the mobility of labour. The former slaveholders displayed a remarkable tenacity. Most significantly, Cape landlords were heirs to a carefully constructed political economy in which the rules governing the circulation of land and wealth were clearly defined in community and familial terms and in which the ties of credit ran both vertically and horizontally. This was a ‘moral community’ in which all were cushioned against the sometimes detrimental effects of participation in a market economy. It is for this reason that the intervention of English-speaking merchants, by not paying due regard to these rules, was of a qualitatively different kind. Community, in short, provides the backdrop against which much of the colony's agrarian history was played out.This article seeks to provide a rather different interpretation of the post-emancipation Western Cape than is at present on offer.</jats:p

Corporate Ownership in France: The Importance of History

This paper attempts to show the importance of history in influencing the structure of corporate ownership in France. The strong concentration of family ownership in France is traced to historical weaknesses in the money and capital markets that forced families to have recourse to self-financing. The weaknesses in the money and capital markets were greatly influenced by two eighteenth century financial traumas arising from John Law's Mississippi System (1716-20) and the financing of the French Revolution through the issue of the assignats in the 1790s.These financial traumas delayed significantly the emergence of banks and the capital market. Further historical factors influencing French corporate ownership were the changes in the inheritance law system at the start of the nineteenth century and, more recently, the emphasis on a pay-as-you-go pension system.

Banking as an emerging technology: Hoare's Bank, 1702-1742

London’s financial market underwent dramatic change after 1700. More limited than Paris or Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, London became the leading financial centre in Europe in the eighteenth century. There is an extensive and growing literature on the causes of this change, but comparatively little on the change itself. This article provides detailed information on the operation of the London financial market around 1700 by describing the operations of a nascent London bank.

A Comparison of Veblen and Schumpeter on Technology

This paper aims at demonstrating the significance of two alternative approaches developed by Veblen and Schumpeter to technology underlying recent institutionalist and evolutionary stances. It should be mentioned that it is not the primary object of this paper to specify their clear-cut disagreement about the characterization of technology and the process of technical advance. Instead, it is engage with providing with an overall understanding of technological motion in capitalist accumulation processes by reconciling the two approaches in a meaningful way. Thus, this comparative analysis based upon their congruent and conflicting arguments presents us not only a general review and the solid foundations of an institutionalist approach to technological phenomena, but also an alternative conceptual framework for science and technology policy studies.

Macroeconomic Implications of Gold Reserve Policy of the Bank of England during the Eighteenth Century

By imposing a simple adjustment cost on gold purchases the Bank of England was able to manage external drains of monetary gold while maintaining the convertibility of pound during the eighteenth century. This was a period during which constant political disturbances and external shocks on the market price of gold made monetary policy a challenging task. The implications of adjustment cost were not just limited to the gold reserves of the Bank, but stabilised consumption and the price level.Gold standard, Monetary policy, Monetary regimes, Adjustment Costs.

The Bank of England and the genesis of modern management

In 1965 Sidney Pollard published The Genesis of Modern Management, an extended discussion of the problems, during Britain’s initial period of industrialisation, of the ‘internal management’ of the firm. But, in his focus on industry, Pollard ignored one of the largest, most significant and most innovative of the enterprises of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries: The Bank of England. This paper focuses on the Bank as a site of precocious managerial development. It first establishes that the Bank, by the latter part of the eighteenth century, encompassed the complexities of a large-scale industrial enterprise. It employed a workforce of several hundred. Its workers operated in specialised and coordinated capacities. Its managerial hierarchy was diffuse and dependent on employed men, rather than the elected directorate. The Bank, therefore, warrants comparison with the types of enterprises identified by Pollard. Focusing on the 1780s, the paper then explores the Bank’s organisational and management structure against Pollard’s four aspects of management: ‘the creation and training of a class of managers; ‘the recruitment, training, disciplining and acculturation of labour’; the use of ‘accountancy, and other information …in the rational determination of their decisions’ and finally the question of whether there emerged a ‘theory and practice of “management”’. It will demonstrate that, although not always applied effectively, the Bank’s senior men did show managerial innovation and skill in training and organising the workforce and were able to make informed decisions which had the potential to improve some of the Bank’s processes