ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Continuity and discontinuity – the early stage of the land-bank controversy
Author: Ito Seiichiro
The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 brought a heated controversy lasting years, mainly between numberless land-bank projectors and the supporters of the Bank. However, this controversy, which has been often regarded as coloured by country-court politics, was indeed on the extended line of the century-long discussion around establishing banks; though in the year 1694 the vocabulary and the structure of debates certainly began to change. A sequence of John Briscoe’s pamphlets published in this year, in which he criticises the Bank of England and proposes his own land-bank project, typically show where these discussions sprang from and where they were headed for, while Hugh Chamberlen, who had already been a prolific bank-projector for more than a decade, still appears to have tried to preside over the debates. Their and the other projectors’ awareness of the economically and politically interested groups emerging and the theoretical analysis of the relationship between money supply and ‘fund’ or ‘security’ were the unique features of bank-proposals in this period. But, what I here want to insist on is that the emphasis in the bank projects was still on the safety and reliability of the proposed banks just as was so throughout the century. Their sales points were not exclusively about for whose benefit it would be in an economic sense but rather on how viable and trustworthy the proposed institutions were.
Registred web users only can download this paper - Go back
Please note that files available for download have not been checked for viruses. These files have been submitted by authors of the conference to this web site. Conference organisers can't accept any responsibility for damages caused to users by downloading such files.