War

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Timothy Alborn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Precious Metal ◽  
Bank Of England

For much of the eighteenth century, Britons remarked on gold’s sordid uses by their European rivals in diplomacy and war; only after 1750 did they start criticizing such abuses by their own rulers. After 1789, constant French allusions to “Pitt’s gold” prompted most British observers to discount the same associations between gold and foreign policy that they had long taken for granted as truisms of history. During the war against Napoleon, when British gold in circulation and in banks fell from more than £40 million to around £3 million, subsidies continued to occupy an exaggerated position in rhetoric surrounding this drain. The major debate pitted those who claimed trade as the culprit and those who blamed an over-issue of Bank of England notes. The result in either case was the same: twenty years of living without guineas permanently altered Britons’ perception of that precious metal.

scholarly journals The Soane-Dance Collaboration, 1771-1799

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 163-190
Author(s):  
Jill Lever
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Bank Of England

After the publication for Sir John Soane’s Museum of a Catalogue of the Drawings of George Dance the Younger (1741-1825) (in 2003) further cataloguing of, and research into, John Soane’s early drawings has enabled the reattribution to George Dance of a number of sketch designs previously thought to be by Soane. In particular there are several drawings from the years 1771 to 1784, when Soane was a student and exhibitor at the Royal Academy, a competition entrant, and in the first years of practice. Later sketch designs by Dance for Soane then relate to several phases of the rebuilding of the Bank of England in the 1790s. It has also been possible to identify Robert Baldwin as the draughtsman for many of Soane’s early Royal Academy and competition drawings, as well as during Soane’s early years in practice, from 1780 to 1785. These discoveries bring to light not only the character of the collaboration between Soane and Dance, but also aspects of architectural practice more generally in the late eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Performing Public Credit at the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne L. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
The State ◽  
Secondary Market ◽  
National Debt ◽  
Personal Credit ◽  
Internal Structures ◽  
Public Credit ◽  
Bank Of England ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractMuch 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.

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