Conclusion

The discovery of gold in California in 1848, and in Australia three years later, transformed the landscape for most of the themes discussed in the book. By doubling the world’s supply of gold in less than a decade, these discoveries produced short-term inflation and, over time, made it possible for other nations to join Britain on the gold standard—both of which processes radically altered the financial significance of gold in the British economy. By newly identifying the extraction of gold with the British Empire, the Australian gold rush rendered it more difficult for British observers to domesticate the metal. The huge influx of new gold supplies also threatened to wreak havoc on the conviction that gold was perennially precious. Although it would soon regain its prior value, the misgivings that surfaced in the 1850s remind us that gold’s value was always contingent.

Distinction

“Distinction” identifies the often-tortured efforts by Britons to have their gold and wear it too. Mayors, liverymen, admirals, peers, and royals conspicuously brandished gold well into the nineteenth century, while belittling foreigners and status-hungry nouveau riches for wearing wealth. The ideal and reality did start to converge after 1820, when doctors started to trade in their gold-headed canes for stethoscopes, watches lost their gold chains, and gold-laced hats gave way to felt derbies. Increasingly, wearing gold appeared in conduct manuals and novels as resoundingly atavistic; and once it had been consigned to the past it could be safely enjoyed in historical settings, as when Victoria and Albert presided over costume balls bedecked in Elizabethan embroidery. More generally, Britons carefully carved out exceptions—including servants, military officers, and members of the royal family—that proved a general rule against wearing gold.

Trade

After 1820, most Britons recognized that the tight money supplies created by the gold standard had the effect of periodically depressing economic activity. These downturns also linked gold to poor harvests, since grain imports drained the metal from the Bank of England, and protectionists predicted disastrous consequences for the country under free trade, owing to the additional strains that such imports would place on gold reserves. This chapter places these mercantilist anxieties in the context of older fears of bullion drains to India and China, since the arguments in the 1830s echoed earlier Orientalist ethnographies, and examines the liberal response, which tried to divert attention away from gold and toward the Bank’s lending practices. Class fissures widened in a political system that secured the fortunes of financiers (through the gold standard) and landed aristocrats (through the Corn Laws) but left factory owners and urban laborers on the outside looking in.

Coinages

“Coinages” emphasizes the irony that gold coins recurrently needed to be weighed by consumers despite bearing stamps that attested to their legal weight. As guineas (and then sovereigns, from 1817), gold embodied the coin of the realm, and in the process divided society between those who could or could not afford to carry them in their pockets or store them in their bank. Before 1800, employers and landed elites almost exclusively comprised the former class, while the vast majority of the population struggled to find small change; after a twenty-year hiatus in which paper money mostly replaced gold, sovereigns made their debut in 1817, with a wider circulation that reflected rising standards of living. Although gold coins mainly signified economic power, social status sometimes appeared around the edges: for instance, in the survival of guineas after 1820 as the preferred denomination of doctors and lawyers.

Before the Gold Rush

“Before the Gold Rush” recounts British efforts to find new sources of gold in order to enable the smooth functioning of the newly restored gold standard after 1820. Their first port of call was Latin America, where mining had declined during Napoleon’s occupation of Iberia; despite substantial investment by British speculators, this sector never regained its prior prominence as a world leader in gold yields. Instead Russia picked up that baton, yielding nearly half of the world’s total output by the early 1840s. Although Britons welcomed the new gold, they did so warily, owing to that country’s status as their leading national rival. Such concerns prompted them to hedge their bets by prospecting for gold (without much success) in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia—parts of the world that were all conveniently in the process of passing under direct British rule.

Devotion

“Devotion” examines British critiques of excessive adornment in non-Protestant churches and temples. Most typically, these accounts interpreted religious ornament as the initial, and hence most infantile, stage in the evolution of gold’s various possible uses. Britons documented instances of gilded idolatry in cathedrals from Mexico City to Moscow—and in all cases, half-excused the plunder of such treasures. They confirmed the backward devotional uses of gold abroad by pointing to their own pre-Reformation past. While recollections of British churches before Henry VIII widened the gap between Catholic and Protestant uses of gold, however, they also betrayed nostalgia for a more glorious era—especially among Anglicans who edged closer to Catholicism in the 1830s and in the profusion of town and county histories that appeared after 1780, many of which lamented the absence of adornment in their (now-Anglican) cathedrals.

Value

Especially after the British Parliament formally adopted the gold standard in 1821, economists reinforced its legitimacy by building on Adam Smith’s account of value in The Wealth of Nations, which followed gold from its decorative uses to its use as a basis of credit. They also sharpened his distinction between gold’s minimal use-value and its exchange-value; and, under newfound conditions of scarcity, they focused attention on the diversion of gold away from ornamental purposes. In laying out this multipronged elaboration of gold’s value, political economy shared space with numerous other discourses—evident in novels, poems, essays, and sermons—that used gold as a metaphor for Christian virtue, artistic genius, and class; or that emphasized gold’s poisonous potential, building on a long history of the metal as an object of monstrous desire.

Display

“Display” discusses gold’s appearance in British ethnographies of a wide variety of people who broadcast foreignness with gold earrings, nose rings, chains, bracelets, bangles, and bells. This genre of writing was most evocative in descriptions of Greek and Middle Eastern women who brandished coins around their necks instead of concealing them in their pockets; but it was also present in depictions of African kings, Southern European peasants, and—most effusively—South Asians of nearly all castes and ethnicities. In the course of describing foreign adornment, travel writers developed a series of models that explained the brandishing of gold as rational for the stage of civilization under review but not, implicitly, for contemporary British society; and British visitors to almost every foreign clime viewed golden ornaments as picturesque signs of a society frozen in age-old customs.

War

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.

Graven Images

Issues of status and class appeared with new twists when gold took the form of ancient coins and modern medals. The discovery of buried gold often pitted working-class finders, whose rational response was to melt their finds down for the bullion content, against educated collectors, who were appalled by such disregard for history and aesthetics. Gold medals, for their part, measured merit among the closed ranks of aristocratic politicians, sportsmen, students, and men of science, often in explicit contrast to cash awards doled out to people of less status or means. These graven images conjured nonmonetary (and, consequently, controversial) value by enabling Britons to discover their forebears, broadcast their erudition, or locate themselves in posterity.