Abundance and scarcity: classical theories of money, bank balance sheets and business models, and the British restriction of 1797‐1818.

The thesis looks through the lens of bank balance sheet accounting to investigate the structural change in the British banking system between 1780 and 1832, and how classical quantity theorists of money attempted to respond to the ensuing financialisation of the wartime economy with its growing reliance on credit funded with paper-based instruments (the ‘Vansittart system’ of war finance). The thesis combines contributions to three separate fields to construct a holistic historical example of the challenges faced by monetary economists when ‘modelling’ financial innovation, credit growth, ‘fringe’ banking, and agent incentives – at a time of radical experimentation: the suspension of the 80-year-old gold standard (“the Restriction”). First, critical text analysis of the history of economics argues that the 1809-10 debate between Ricardo and Bosanquet at the peak of the credit boom, bifurcated classical theory into two timeless competing policy paradigms advocating the ‘Scarcity’ or ‘Abundance’ of money relative to exchange transactions. The competing hypotheses regarding the role of money and credit are identified and the rest of the thesis examines the archival evidence for each. Second, the core of the thesis contributes to the historical literature on banking in relation to money by reconstructing a taxonomy of bank business models, their relationships with the London inter-bank settlement system, and their responses to the Restriction - drawing on some 17,000 mostly new data points collected from the financial records of London and Country banks. The final section contributes to the economic history of money by constructing aggregated views of total bank liabilities from the firm-level data, scaled to recently available British GDP estimates. These are examined to establish (with hindsight) the relative merits and lacuna of the competing theoretical hypotheses postulated by political economists. It was the period of deleveraging after 1810 that revealed the lacuna of both paradigms

Contending with Spiritual Reductionism: Demons, Shame, and Dividualising Experiences Among Evangelical Christians with Mental Distress

The belief that mental distress is caused by demons, sin, or generational curses is commonplace among many evangelical Christian communities. These beliefs may have positive or negative effects for individuals and groups. Phenomenological descriptions of these experiences and the subjective meanings associated with them, however, remain somewhat neglected in the literature. The current study employed semi-structured interviews with eight evangelical Christians in order to idiographically explore their experiences of mental distress in relation to their faith and wider communities. Through an interpretative phenomenological analysis, two superordinate themes were constructed: negative spiritualisation and negotiating the dialectic between faith and the lived experience of mental distress. Participants variously experienced a climate of negative spiritualisation, whereby their mental distress was demonised and dismissed, and they were further discouraged from seeking help in secular institutions and environments. Participants often considered such dismissals of their mental distress as unhelpful and stigmatising and experienced heightened feelings of shame and suffering as a result. Such discouragement also contributed to the process of othering and relational disconnection. Alongside a rejection of church teachings, which exclusively spiritualised psychological distress, participants negotiated a nuanced personal synthesis of faith, theology, and distress, which assumed a localised and idiographic significance. This synthesis included advocating for the uptake of aetiological accounts, which contextualised mental distress in terms of the whole person and resisted de-politicised, dichotomised, and individualistic narratives. Results are discussed in relation to a broad range of literature in the field, while further research suggestions are provided.N/