The crisis of coin in early modern England

This dissertation examines the role and meaning of money during England's transition from a moral to a market economy, during a crucial phase in the process, the later seventeenth century. During those years, the role of coin in the economy was uncertain, and questioned. These crises forced economists, philosophers, politicians, poets, and playwrights to create a new money that would fuel economic and political growth. Analyzing the reality and representation of money in political debate, court records, commercial accounts, economic writings, poetry, and dramatic literature, I explore how English people confronted and resolved a crisis of coin brought on by its scarcity. The inadequacies of the coinage required new thinking about money, and the use of several different types of specie to supplement and eventually replace coin. The foremost of these was credit, the opposite of coin in every regard: infinite, private, and convenient. Increasing reliance on this form of money was part of a shift from an economy conceived in terms of virtue to one of profit, and from a polity ideally ruled by affect to one governed by self-interest. The elaboration of more impersonal forms of credit allowed the English government to break with customary financial practice and institute what we now recognize as deficit spending. Chapter one analyzes the impact of the crisis of coin on politics. The crisis of coin occasioned a new model of politics, in which faction, cynicism and self-interest became not only explicit but also legitimate tools of governance. Chapter two presents much of the empirical evidence to support the claims made in Chapter one about the disruptive effects of the Stop. It analyzes two main data sets, both of which show significant peaks and troughs in their numbers in the year of the Stop, demonstrating that the Stop had an impact not just on the government but on wider society. Chapter three studies the finances of some of the English aristocracy during the crisis. These records illustrate not only new understandings of the economy but also a coarsening and hardening of social relations. Chapter four examines debates in the economic literature of the period. The crisis of coin signaled the inadequacy of the existing monetary system, forcing English economists to elaborate new kinds of money that would fuel economic and political growth. Chapter five examines how the changes discussed in the previous four chapters affected the literary expressions and idioms of these years. The literature of the period is rife with the vocabulary of credit and exchange, of commerce and the transactions of which money is the crux. It introduced into the discourse ideas about credit, culture, and commerce that previously had been unthinkable.