The Political Economy of Silver Money in England, 1542-1696

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the myriad intellectual, economic, political, and cultural forces that shaped the development of English monetary policy between the Great Debasement of the 1540s and the Great Recoinage of the 1690s. It argues that a distinct school of English political economy originated in the second half of the sixteenth century as a series of open-ended investigations into the relationship between the money supply and prices that began the aftermath of monetary crisis and continued in the face of mounting fiscal pressures upon the state. The process focused attention on the constituent materials of hard currency. The political economy of commodity money accounted for the various physical forms in which these metals occurred and the ways in which gold, silver, and the value they represented circulated. The dissertation answers recent calls by revisionist historians of money to study currencies with an eye to the knowledge-making practices and cultural assumptions that state actors bring to bear on monetary design and policy. To do so, it proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of early modern commodity money that bridges the historiographies of the fiscal state, science and technology, political economy, and literature. It sheds light on the enormous complexity of England’s bimetallic monetary system and the ways that the state and its administrators attempted to understand and manage that complexity