Carey and Finlay's edited volume, promisingly titled Empire of Credit, proposes to “consider how the Financial Revolution transpired in England, Scotland, and America” (12). It does not do this in a straightforward way, but instead it offers chapters that fall, with some overlap, into two broad categories. The first is the intellectual history of money during the long eighteenth century. The second is Irish financial history. A few unrelated articles fill out the collection.
In her book Bimetallism, Angela Redish wrote that “historians have filled vast tomes with the details of the characteristics and operation of commodity money standards—to them commodity money is a complex beast” (Cambridge University Press, 2000, 12). The first category of chapters of Empire of Credit contributes to this complexity (and to the large pile of books), with its focus on thinkers actively influencing money policy in England, Ireland, Scotland, and America. The subject is clearly the area where the editors are most comfortable, as shown by their own chapters: Carey's on John Locke's thinking during the English currency crisis of the 1690s, and Finlay's on David Hume's musings on commodity currencies.
Locke's attention to the problems of money, outlined in his debate with William Lowndes at the Treasury, is well known. Carey has presented Locke's ideas adeptly, ultimately placing them, in contrast to those of Charles Davenant, within the realm of imagination. This ontological connection is made through the extrinsic value of commodity currency, which turned Locke against limitless devaluation. Greater discussion of this idea would have enriched Carey's chapter, but instead, a large share is dedicated to a correct but niggling critique of Joyce Oldham Appleby's now-distant 1976 article “Locke, Liberalism, and the Natural Law of Money,” (Past & Present, 71, pp. 43–69). In contrast to Locke's mature thinking (and Carey's parallel essay), Finlay's chapter on Hume's theory of money feels thin, because Hume did not write very much about the topic. Finlay has combed the Treatise and the Discourses for references and concluded that Hume “was simply ambivalent about different forms of currency” (71).
Paul Tonk's chapter explores Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the question of paper versus commodity currency by examining four thinkers of the movement: Patrick Colquhoun, John Sinclair, William Playfair, and George Chalmers. These men were in broad agreement over the importance of public credit and its role in the maintenance of a strong state in an international atmosphere of revolution. The import of these ideas can be shown redoubled against the historical background: new figures from Julian Hoppit show that Customs and Excise revenues raised in Scotland increased more than tenfold between the Act of Union and 1799, almost all during the final quarter of the century. This context, and the opposition in some elite Scottish circles to rising exactions by London's extending sinews of power, puts into context the thinking of Tonks's subjects.
Roger Fechner's contribution takes the debate to postrevolutionary United States and the staunch commodity-money approach of John Witherspoon, his Essay on Money, and his influence on Alexander Hamilton's monetary decision making, which Fechner outlines in detail. Although little in Witherspoon's thought was original, his legacy was relatively important to early US financial policy and by extension perhaps to the conditions that led to Harry Dexter White's stance at Bretton Woods. Historical context is again limited, however. Witherspoon wrote against a background of long American experience of paper currencies, from emissions of individual colonies in the late seventeenth century (notes which continued to circulate), and the extensive issues of the Continental Congress—experiences whose influence on Hamilton and the nation's monetary future were surely critical. The same influence cannot be attributed to Bishop George Berkeley, the Querist, whose plan for an Irish national bank fell on deaf ears, as George Caffentzis's chapter explains. In so doing, however, the essay sheds light on some familiar attitudes about the Anglo-Irish establishment's relationship with Westminster.
C. George Caffentzis's chapter also falls into the second category of essays in Empire of Credit, those that discuss Irish financial history. Here Charles Ivar McGrath's contribution on the creation and maintenance of an Irish national debt is the key contribution. It provides detail of the phenomenon, focusing especially on who comprised Irish public creditors in the period from 1716 to 1745 and how the politics of state finance aligned with political and confessional identities. This is familiar territory for McGrath, visited in somewhat more detail in his book, Ireland and Empire, 1692–1770 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012). Sean Moore's chapter on clerical lending as a force of coercion carries forward some of McGrath's themes, illuminating the widespread and longstanding practice of parish-level lending by clergy. Moore argues that proposals to create a national bank, discussed by McGrath, were defeated in part due to the threat they posed to this entrenched credit system. However, Moore's casting of clerical credit as “a form of debt bondage” (210) are perhaps overcooked, given the long history of the practice he describes and the loose religious responsibilities that borrowers and everyone else were expected to perform. Kevin Barry's essay turns to the literary commentary on money in Ireland at the end of the long eighteenth century and rounds out the collection well by highlighting contrasts between English and Irish views of the question.
Two further chapters appear in the volume. In its lone nod to the book's intriguing title, Hermann Wellenreuther presents a strong and highly engaging argument about an inversion of economic dependence between Britain and America well before independence in 1775. In contrast, Robin Hermann's chapter on the Royal African Company presents an interesting thesis—that its dual charter mandate of gathering gold and supplying slaves led ultimately to its failure—but one which uncomfortably conflates money and trade goods, and sidesteps other enormous challenges faced by the company—notably the loss of its monopoly in 1689.
Empire of Credit includes several essays that provide new insights and may prove of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars with an interest in money and national credit. However, taken as a whole, it seems to want to be two books—one focused on the evolution of thought related to money and the political economy, and another about Irish financial history. That they have been collocated in this volume, with some other bits besides, could mean that the content that deserves the most attention will be short-changed.
