10
10.1. Foundation of the Bank of England
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Genoese Gianandrea Ceva wrote a poem celebrating the Casa di San Giorgio.1 He described the temple of Saint George as having been built in London, England, but now deserted, having over time fallen into ruin. The saint thus decided to convert another people to his cult. He reached Genoa, woke up a fisherman, and asked him to build a temple in his honor. The new temple became the Casa di San Giorgio; over time, it flourished and became rich.
Ceva did not recognize that the medieval cult of Saint George came not from the west but from the east. It became a Genoese cult in the Middle Ages when the city shifted its interest to the east and controlled territories in the Mediterranean. He also failed to mention a legend about the desire of the English in the Middle Ages to borrow the flag of Genoa—the symbol of San Giorgio.
In 1694, a century after the poem was written, San Giorgio’s model was described as spreading in the opposite direction, from east to west. At the time of the creation of the Bank of England, some of its founders used the example of Casa di San Giorgio to justify that founding. It is at this moment that Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, appears in contemporary texts.
Through his celebrated work, The Machiavellian Moment, John A. Pocock has built a paradigmatic case for the migration of Machiavelli’s thought from Florence to England and early America.2 He shows how Machiavelli’s thought—even in England and America, which had political contexts quite different from Florence’s—led to a series of political transformations and innovations. But The Machiavellian Moment did not consider any of the thinker’s economic and financial ideas. According to Pocock, the field of economics innovated and became speculative—that is, based on paper and not real values—in the eighteenth century with the so-called English Financial Revolution. Speculative finance was supposedly an independent English achievement.
Pocock may have adopted this perspective because he followed the liberal tradition that considers finance a product of England. Following Pocock’s work on the movement of Machiavellian thought through places and time—while reading against his specific and limited view of finance—this chapter shows that Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, on the finance of San Giorgio, was used in the foundation of both the Bank of England and the First Bank of the United States. The following pages will show how certain Machiavellian ideas on Renaissance finance moved to England and how the English Financial Revolution is thus partially rooted in the Mediterranean Renaissance.
The first projects to recover the English public debt appeared in the 1650s and 1660s;3 many more projects were conceived in later decades. In April 1694, Parliament approved the scheme of William Paterson and Michael Godfrey.4 Paterson had been trying to pursue related projects since 1691, and this new scheme proposed to collect £1,500,000.5 He started by asking investors for £1,200,000; if this much was raised by the first day of August 1694, investors would receive a profit of 8% in 1706. The remainder of the sum (£300,000) was collected with three groups of annuities, at 14%, 12%, and 10%. It took only ten days to collect the sum, and the Bank of England was thereby founded.6 In addition to managing the public debt, the bank soon began to operate as a deposit bank, serving as both a banking institution and the manager of the public debt.7 The total amount of the interest was around £36,000.8 In connection with the interest of 8%, which was quite high for the period, Paterson referred to San Giorgio as a model:
Thus having said what a Bank ought to be, it remains to shew what [sic] this is designed, and wherein it will consist. This bank will consist in a revenue or income of eight per cent. per annum, for and upon the money subscribed; and what profits and improvements can be made from the business or credit of the bank will be also divided among the proprietors. Thus, this Company or Corporation will exceed all others of that kind known in the commercial world… . Nor are they corroborated by the interests, property, and estates of private men, that of Genoa only excepted.9
Paterson was proudly stating that among all other banks, his was the only one that provided 8% interest to investors—San Giorgio of Genoa excepted. From the first years of the nineteenth century, the historiography on the Bank of England noted that it was modeled on San Giorgio. In a volume published in 1808, John Dyer Collier wrote:
All but the Genoese Bank were formed solely for the convenience of merchants; the latter was not only for that general purpose, but was also founded for immediate emolument of the individual proprietors, and after this model, the Bank of England was established in 1694.10
Collier’s phrase “All but the Genoese Bank” recalls what Paterson had written. It is likely that Collier based his text on Paterson’s previously quoted paragraph. The only one of San Giorgio’s characteristics that Paterson mentioned was the 8% interest. There was no mention in his work of San Giorgio as a model for the public debt in England and nothing on San Giorgio’s territorial power—even though Paterson had planned a commercial company, the Darien Company, to exploit the Isthmus of Panama. Here, commercial exploitation was clearly connected with territorial control. The Panama project failed in 1695.11
San Giorgio was not the only model used in England. There were many banks in Europe at the time, many of which were known in England.12 In the years before the foundation of the Bank of England, many schemes were proposed to recover the public debt. Some reused the ideas of the tontine or the lottery—projects well known in Europe. Tontines were subscriptions of private investors who received interest payments yearly. The Italian Lorenzo Tonti invented these investment plans in France, and they soon took hold in the United Provinces. Lotteries were of medieval origin and were widespread in Italy as well as in the Low Countries. Discussions of these models took place not only during the foundation of the Bank of England, but in subsequent years.
In 1695, a number of pamphlets were published on the foundation of the Bank of England. As it has been noted: “commentators in later seventeenth-century England were obsessed with comparative economic development. They tried to account for Venetian economic decline, the surprising prominence of Genoa, and the trading success of imperial free cities.”13 The production of pamphlets on the Bank of England can be viewed in the context of a wider production of financial pamphlets that began at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Carl Wennerlind has connected the spread of these pamphlets to the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution—thus anticipating the origin of the Financial Revolution.14 As Steven Pincus has noted, various scholars have studied the pamphlets and ideas contemporary English intellectuals had about the foundation of the Bank of England. Some (such as the sociologists North and Weingast) see the Bank of England as an innovation that followed the 1688 Revolution; others (such as Pocock) see it as a reaction to that revolution.15 Against these generic positions, Steven Pincus maintains the importance of reconstructing the Bank of England’s historical context. He has placed the foundation of the bank in the context of the 1688 Revolution and the debate between Tories and Whigs.16 The latter supported projects of economic politics, while the Tories were against them.
In the English context, the term “corporation” usually referred to intermediate bodies such as guilds and universities and had a long tradition. As we saw in Chapter 1, in the nineteenth century only the EIC was called a corporation; the term was used for the Bank of England only during its foundation and early years. The Tories considered corporations “little republics” that were potentially dangerous to the Crown. This was an old critical tradition, recalled both by Peter Dickson in his famous work on the English Financial Revolution and by John Gunn.17 Dickson noted that John Harrington’s The Prerogative of Popular Government (1657) linked banks to a republic: “Where there is a Bank ten to one there is a Commonwealth.”18 Before writing this book, Harrington wrote Oceana, a political utopia set in England. In The Prerogative of Popular Government, he justified the link between republics and banks at the end of a paragraph on the Dutch and Genoese republics. Harrington believed that Genoa and the Netherlands had altered the balance between land and money, the essential components of his political thought.19 He wrote that in other countries like Spain, the balance was in favor of land, because money (or economic production) was insufficient in comparison with land. England and the republic of Oceana, on the contrary, maintained a perfect balance between land and money. To avoid a disproportion of money to land, ancient city-states Sparta and Israel had instituted strong laws. At Sparta, citizens were forbidden to touch money, which was considered corrupting; in Israel, people were forbidden to issue loans to relatives. In the Netherlands and Genoa, the balance was in favor of money (usury), since both had small territories and little land. According to Harrington, Genoa and the Netherlands had invented the banking system, the Genoese being able to create a bank from letters of exchange and the Dutch from herrings.20 Harrington not only connected the concept of banks and corporations to that of a republic—which we see in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, VIII, 29—but like Machiavelli, he also analyzed the relationship between money and territories. Harrington thought that too much money affected the territory, and the Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, pointed out that San Giorgio, a corporation, had been able to take Genoa’s territories step by step because the Commune needed money. Harrington did not quote Machiavelli’s passage on San Giorgio—though he knew Machiavelli’s works well—but it is possible to hear its echo in his passage on the Netherlands and Genoa.
The connection between republic (commonwealth) and banking is also present in England in the papers of William Paterson, who maintained that English politicians had always connected the two concepts in order to avoid the foundation of a bank.21
The next pages analyze two pamphlets, published in 1708 and 1710, that compare the Bank of England to San Giorgio using Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. They can be studied through the lens of the debate between Tories and Whigs. Both belong to the long critical tradition opposing corporations as “little republics.”22
10.2. English Bank Founders and Machiavelli
In 1695, a year after the foundation of the Bank of England, an anonymous writer compared it to San Giorgio and quoted Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. As we know, San Giorgio not only managed the Commune’s debt and ruled over territories but also performed the functions of a bank. The pamphlet’s title was Some observations upon the Bank.23 It mentioned the banks of Venice and Hamburg, but the most important example was Genoa. Among the various concepts of the Florentine Histories, this pamphlet emphasizes San Giorgio’s stability and its autonomy vis-à-vis the Commune.24 It states that the Bank of England “resembles this bank of St. George more than any other Constitution in Christendom.”25 Considering San Giorgio a positive model, the pamphlet refers to characteristics that were known in the early modern age but not mentioned in Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. It mentions San Giorgio’s role in protecting the investments of everyone, even the enemies of the Genoese republic; the tradability of San Giorgio’s shares and their wide market; and the importance of San Giorgio’s bank for the Spanish sovereigns.26 The pamphlet states that just as the Indies were a source of wealth for the Spanish sovereigns, San Giorgio was for Genoa. It is likely that this reference to the Spanish sovereigns circulated later than that of the passage in Machiavelli. Genoa was not aligned with the Spanish kingdom until the government of Andrea Doria, from the 1530s on. Furthermore, San Giorgio was not a bank until the 1530s—at which point Machiavelli (d. 1527) was no longer writing.
Some years after the foundation of the Bank of England and the publication of Some observations upon the Bank, a pamphlet came out that saw San Giorgio’s model negatively, but here, too, Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, appeared. In 1708, the publisher John Morphew published A Short View of the Bank of St. George of Genova with Some Queries Concerning the Bank of England.27 The text opens with a passage from Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, as translated in the English edition of 1674, followed by a short paragraph called “The Resemblance.” It maintains that San Giorgio and the Bank of England are very similar (this idea was borrowed from the 1695 pamphlet) and raises 11 questions, “The Queries,” about the dangers the Bank of England could lead to. The questions are inspired by Machiavelli’s thoughts about the relationship between San Giorgio and the Genoese government, but addressed to the English case and adapted to a negative analysis. Not only are they radical, they move past the specifics of any one bank or project to take up more fundamental and more general questions about finance and governance:
Whether the power and wealth of a nation, being so engrossed, the engrossers may not either subvert the government, or leave it only its name? Whether the pretence that the bank is necessary to the government, does not as necessarily infer, that the government is in the bank’s hands?28
Two years later in 1710, the pamphlet The vindication and advancement of our national constitution, quoting Some observations on the Bank, also made use of Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. The most recent hypotheses have pointed to a John Broughton as the author, while earlier studies indicated Charles Davenant.29 The text was published in the form of four pamphlets, and the first refers directly to San Giorgio and Florentine Histories, VIII, 29.30 The pamphlet mentions that among the various banks founded before the Bank of England, the most important were those of Amsterdam, Venice, Hamburg, and Genoa. The first three banks were similar in that they were in the hands of their respective country’s government, but they differed from the Bank of England, which was more like the fourth example, the Genoese Bank of San Giorgio. The pamphlet quotes the 1695 pamphlet, which considered San Giorgio to be the closest model to the English bank.31 The author mentions Florentine Histories, VIII, 29 (p. 5) and, like Machiavelli’s text—which he summarizes—he builds a broad model of analysis in three points. He then applies the model back to San Giorgio, which becomes an example (this part, at p. 6, is called “The example” in the margin). At this point the pamphlet quotes extensively from Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. It then uses the broad model it has developed to analyze the Bank of England in the Remarks (at p. 26). The author builds his model on three phases of events. In the first phase, the bank becomes the only lender to the government; in the second, it overturns the government; clearing the way for the third phase, endless revolutions: “And when this is done, there is a foundation laid of perpetual revolutions in the government.” The author then relates this general scheme to the case of San Giorgio. First, San Giorgio, as the only lender to the government of Genoa, forced the Commune to give away its territories:
St. George was the great and only lender, and somewhat more than dangerous, when Machiavel tells us, most of those towns and lands, (that were in mortgage to them) formerly subject to the Genouese, submitted to them.
The consequence of this territorial change was that San Giorgio took control of Genoa and the citizens gave their love to San Giorgio. Quoting the Florentine Histories, the author wrote:
[St. George] govern’d and defended them [the towns and lands] and every year, by public vote, sent their rectors; and the commonalty (that is the government) of the city was not concerned.
Then follow the sentences introduced from the grammatical connection “onde ne” (whence), analyzed in Chapter 8. Citizens withdrew their love from the Commune and placed it in San Giorgio:
Whence it come to pass, that those citizens have taken away their love to the rules of the commonalty, as a thing usurped and tyranized (tho’ indeed the ancient constitution) and plac’d it on St. George, as a rule well and equally administred.
This in turn led to a perpetual revolution:
Whence, says he [Machiavelli], (that is from the Bank’s administration) arises the frequent and easy change of Government, and that sometimes they obey a citizen, and sometimes a stranger.32
This series of events was caused by the existence, within the same walls, of two different powers. Machiavelli had forged the idea of a double sovereignty (corporation vs. Commune), and this was occurring again, the author said, in England with the foundation of the Bank of England.
In the entire corpus of the quotations of Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, there is not a single line that explains the sentence introduced by “Whence” and its link with the previous one.
In Chapter 8 (§ 8.2) I proposed that the two sentences—that is, the removal of the people’s love from the Commune to San Giorgio and the weakness of the government—are connected and that this is Machiavelli’s most interesting idea about San Giorgio. To my knowledge there are no texts in either the early modern age nor in the last few centuries that explain how Machiavelli connected the Commune’s weakness to the existence of a financial power. Nobody has connected this “onde ne” (whence) with the previous sentence―except the anonymous author (perhaps John Broughton?) of The vindication and advancement of our national constitution. He felt the need to explain this complex connection by introducing a parenthesis, “that is from the Bank’s administration”—i.e., from San Giorgio’s administration of the territories. This short parenthetical is where the author explains that San Giorgio and the Bank of England were similar in the way they absorbed the government’s resources:
here are two constitutions, confessedly, the likest each other in the world. Here are the necessities of borrowing in each government exactly alike; the revenue of both in the same manner mortgag’d; both banks growing rich, while the publick grows poor; both courting the affections of the people; and in a word, unlike in nothing but that the one has, the other has not yet, got possession of the government.33
The pamphlets of 1708 (A Short View) and 1710 (The Vindication) are similar, not only because they have the same perspective on Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, but because they quote the very same words of Machiavelli―not the entire passage about San Giorgio but the same set of specific sentences. The main difference is that the first pamphlet is shorter and the analysis of the second goes deeper and clarifies the meaning of the Machiavelli quotes. It is possible that the same person or persons worked on both pamphlets. Within the corpus of all the writings on the Bank of England in the following years, there are no other texts that refer to the Machiavellian passage and San Giorgio.
What do these cases show? Is it a simple comparison between the Bank of England and San Giorgio, or was the latter a model for the former? The story of William Paterson offers a clear, if partial answer. Since Paterson proposed the project of the Bank of England and mentioned San Giorgio as an example, it is possible to say that San Giorgio was indeed a model. It is impossible to know to what extent San Giorgio was important for Paterson, however, because he quoted only one characteristic of San Giorgio (the 8% interest). The 1708 and 1710 pamphlets show a knowledge of San Giorgio that is deeper, more precise, and mediated by Machiavelli. These pamphlets, however, were written only after the foundation of the Bank of England. While they do not provide much information on whether San Giorgio’s model had an impact on the Bank of England’s foundation, they insist that the two institutions were similar. It is possible that information about San Giorgio and Machiavelli’s passage became available to the author of the 1710 pamphlet only after the foundation of the Bank of England. It is also possible that―even if the knowledge of San Giorgio via Machiavelli was already present in England―it did not affect the foundation of the English institution. It is equally possible that the two pamphlets indicate a deep knowledge of San Giorgio and Machiavelli’s passage. In this case, it may be that San Giorgio’s model was influential before the pamphlets were written.
The 1710 pamphlet had an influence many years after its initial publication, when an excerpt was published 75 years later in the early American Republic.
10.3. Founders of Banks and Machiavelli in North America
During the American Revolution, the colonies faced many financial difficulties, and in 1779 a plan was proposed to address the issue. Alexander Hamilton looked at the model of the Bank of England and proposed to start a bank with $200 million (with an additional $10 million from a European loan).34 His proposal was not realized. In 1781, the plan of Robert Morris, who had discussed his ideas with Hamilton, was realized instead. Morris, who was a private investor, took the position of superintendent.
In 1781, the Bank of North America, a national bank, was funded, obtaining a charter of incorporation from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Morris’s scheme envisioned a first contribution of $400,000 in gold and silver and then several subsequent subscriptions. The scheme allowed for the government to help the bank, led by 12 directors, but not to control it. Morris failed to find investors and instead used his personal contacts, sold the bank’s shares to the army, collected the capital from the Bank of Pennsylvania, and used the money from a loan that France had issued to Congress. The new bank was active between 1781 and 1784, when it issued a loan of $1.25 million to Congress. From 1783, the investors received an interest of 14.5% on their investments. Some criticisms arose against the charter of incorporation in 1785 after Morris resigned as superintendent. At that point, debates arose and pamphlets were published.35
In 1786 the publisher Charles Cist, a German émigré, published an anonymous pamphlet titled Cool Thoughts on the Subject of the Bank, which argued against renewing the bank’s charter.36 A more cautious criticism was expressed by Tench Coxe, a merchant-economist who wrote Thoughts Concerning the Bank, while a positive view appeared in James Wilson’s Consideration on the Bank of North America.37 The anonymous Cool Thoughts used Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, copying the excerpt from the English pamphlet of 1710 (The Vindication). Thus, parts of a pamphlet that contributed to the discussion of the Bank of England moved to the early American Republic, with a few changes along the way. The American pamphlet’s subject was, once again, the relationship between the bank and the government and how to ensure that that relationship was balanced appropriately. The American pamphlets modified the short list of banks―Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam, and Hamburg―provided in the English pamphlets and stated that three were public (England, Amsterdam, and Venice) and one private (Genoa). Curiously, not only did it omit the bank of Hamburg, it considered the English bank to be a public rather than a private institution. The author then stated that the Bank of North America had nothing to do with the public debt, because, as a trading company in the hands of a few investors, it was run by an aristocracy that made decisions according to its investments:
The bank is a private trading company, principally in the hands of four or five persons; who, it is true, have their own private credit to support, but at present they have no connection whatsoever with the credit of the government.38
[It] is not in any respect dependent on government. Here, therefore, is not only a monopoly, but also an aristocracy, formed of a most formidable kind, a monopoly which, by the acquisition of the sanction of government, will be capable of absorbing all the wealth of the United States. And, as wealth creates influence, it is impossible to tell how far their influence may extend.
The next part of the pamphlet features the sentences around the grammatical connection “Whence” (onde ne), copied from the English text of 1710:
I should not have said so much had not the Historian in a manner compelled me to it; but now, as the murther is out, I cannot refrain from giving you his conclusion “Whence,” says he (that is from the Bank’s administration) arises the frequent and easy change of Government, and that sometimes they obey a citizen, and sometimes a stranger.
However, here the anonymous writer was cautious: “I must however do our Bank the justice to say, that she differs widely from the Bank of St. George at Genoa, and that in almost every instance.”39 This sentence was probably intended to avoid a too-critical perspective.
Scholars have connected the foundation of corporations in the early American Republic to the American Revolution.40 This view is similar to the idea that corporations arose in England after the 1688 Revolution. In both the early American Republic and England, the link between republic, corporation, and bank was quite strong. Whenever the link was activated, then Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, and the case of San Giorgio as a revolutionary example appeared. The radical perspective of Cool Thoughts was not seen in other pamphlets, however, even though Tench Coxe quoted Cool Thoughts in his own Thoughts Concerning the Bank. Coxe reused Cool Thoughts to maintain, incorrectly, that the Bank of Genoa (i.e., San Giorgio) had failed, stating that the disruption of the government caused the fall of the bank. This appears to be an oversimplification—and a misunderstanding—of Machiavelli’s text.
Some years later, a quotation of Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, was part of the famous debate in the 1790s on the First Bank of the United States. In 1789, Alexander Hamilton became the first secretary of the treasury, with the support of Robert Morris, whom Hamilton had helped earlier. In 1790, Hamilton wrote Report on a National Bank. On February 8, 1791, the Bank Bill was approved. James Madison opposed the Bank, arguing that the U.S. Constitution had not granted Congress power to incorporate a bank.41 Thomas Jefferson was also against it. In the same period in Madison’s notes, we find a short analysis of Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, which Madison took from a text by Adam Anderson, An historical and chronological deduction of the origin of commerce:42
The Bank of St. George at Genoa—proposed in 1345—erected 1407
· It was produced by public debt & meant as a provision for them
· The Holders of the debt had the customs assigned to them
· They had a Council consisting of 100-& 8 Govrs. for executing the business.
· They became by good management. Very rich & granted aids to the State—for which the Cities & territories of Genoa pawned & were sold.
· The Cities pawned were govd. by the bank.
· Machiavel of opinion that by degrees the Bank wd get possession of the whole city & republic.43
Considering Madison’s position against the foundation of the bank, his view on Machiavelli’s passage is quite clear. Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, ended by praising San Giorgio and hoping that San Giorgio would take all the Commune’s territories. Madison, however, read the text as having the opposite meaning—that is, as showing how dangerous the bank was. He read Machiavelli the same way that the anonymous author of Cool Thoughts, published earlier in Philadelphia, and the author of 1710 English pamphlet The Vindication had. But unlike Cool Thoughts and The Vindication, Madison’s reading summarized the whole passage. Neither pamphlet had quoted or commented on the last line of Machiavelli’s text; Madison, in contrast, summarized the passage’s last lines—those stating that San Giorgio would gradually take full control of the government and city of Genoa—to underscore his opposition to the bank.
Through these pamphlets, we know that the model of San Giorgio and Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, entered the debate over the foundation of the Bank of England and the national bank in the early American Republic at different moments: in England very close to the foundation of the banking institutions, between 1695 and 1711; and in the early American Republic in the same year as the foundation of the Bank of North America, in 1781, and before the 1791 foundation of the First Bank of the United States.
The English and early American quotations of Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, show that Machiavelli’s thought was used to criticize these banks, to express the fear of corporations. These criticisms had a long tradition, both in England, where the corporation was viewed as a danger to the monarchy, and in early America, where it was seen as endangering the Republic.
The information uncovered by this research shows that San Giorgio’s example was not just a part of the debate that came after the foundation of national banks, but an example that influenced the foundation of these institutions. This is a complex topic, however, because it is so closely connected with a different subject: whether the influences were only from the available literature (Machiavelli) or whether knowledge of San Giorgio itself―unmediated by Machiavelli―circulated among traders, investors, and economists. Clearly, Machiavelli’s text played an important role. However, when we look at case studies that go further than quoting Machiavelli, we can see more clearly the key role played by the San Giorgio model in the foundation of financial corporations. This is evident in the case discussed in the next chapter—John Law and the Mississippi Company.
Notes
1. Cesare Federico Goffis, “La presenza virgiliana in un poemetto a celebrazione del Banco di San Giorgio,” in I classici nel medioevo e nell’umanesimo. Miscellanea filologica (Genova: Universita di Genova, 1975), 145–166.
2. John Greville Agard Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). I wish to thank Igor Mineo for this idea about the liberal tradition (he mentioned it during the discussion of my paper “San Giorgio, Machiavelli and the Bank of England,” which I presented during the conference Machiavelli e il pensiero della Crisi, Rome, January 2013).
3. Richard David Richards, The Early History of Banking in England (London: P.S. King & son, 1929), 97–99.
4. Peter George Muir Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1967), 54.
5. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, 55.
6. On the Bank of England, see at least Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, 54–55, on Paterson’s proposal.
7. North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment,” 803–832, at 825.
8. Andreas Michael Andreades, History of the Bank of England, 1640–1903 (London: P.S. King, 1924), 85.
9. William Paterson, The Writings of William Paterson, vol. 3 (London: Judd & Glass, 1859), 84.
10. It is probable that on the basis only of the sentence of Paterson, Collier wrote his thoughts. See John Dyer Collier, The Life of Abraham Newland, esq., Late Principal Cashier at the Bank of England (London: B. Crosby and Co., 1808), 11.
11. On this project, see at least David Armitage, “The Scottish Vision of Empire: Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 97–118.
12. Clapham mentions that Janssen in a 1697 pamphlet referred to 25 European banks founded before the Bank of England. See Sir John Clapham, The Bank of England: A History, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The Macmillan Company, 1945), 3.
13. Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 51.
14. Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit.
15. On these different positions, see Pincus, 1688, 367–368.
16. Pincus, 1688, 368–375.
17. John Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 47.
18. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, 56.
19. James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John Greville Agard Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 59.
20. Harrington, The Political Works, 59.
21. William Paterson, A Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England (London: Randal Taylor, 1694), 1: “our more refined Politicians assured us, that we must never think of settling Banks in England without a Commonwealth: And this Notion became so universal, that it was a matter of derision, for anyone to seem to be of a contrary opinion.”
22. On the pamphlet, The Vindication and Advancement of Our National Constitution (London: Jonah Bowyer, 1710), see Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property, 47.
23. Some Observations upon the Banks of England (London: John Whitlock, 1695).
24. “And in all the Revolutions of the state of Genova, which have not been a few since the constitution of this Bank, the house of St. George was never concerned in any; it not being their province so much to concern themselves at who had the government, as whether the liberties and immunities of the house of St. George were preserved”; Some Observations upon the Banks of England, 5.
25. Some Observations upon the Banks of England, 6.
26. “The effects and treasures of this bank being by inviolable constitutions free from all manner of arrests, attachments, or forfeitures whatsoever; insomuch that the goods estates of the worst enemies, the vilest of traitors, and the best of friends or subjects, are all alike secure in the bank of St. George at Genova,” 4 (emphasis mine).
27. The pamphlet is extremely rare. I found it at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. It is possible that this is the only extant copy.
28. A Short View of the Bank of St. George of Genova with Some Queries Concerning the Bank of England (London: John Morphew, 1708), 3.
29. The English Short Title Catalogue online provides information on the author, http://estc.bl.uk (accessed August 29, 2013).
30. 1. An Introductory Essay; wherein are occasionally consider’d the Two Main Points of her majesty’s title, and the doctrine of Resistance. 2. Remarks upon the Bank of England, with regard more especially to our trade, and the constitution of the government. 3. An essay upon the national credit of Britain. 4. A letter to a Member of the honourable house of commons, relation to the credit of our government and the national in general. The second part of the pamphlet was published in 1705.
31. The Vindication and Advancement, 5.
32. The Vindication and Advancement, 7. (The emphasis in the three quotations is in the original.)
33. The Vindication and Advancement, 6–7.
34. On the Bank of North America, see Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
35. Many of the pamphlets published at that time can be found in Brandon Michael Inabinet, The Bank Controversy of the New Republic: Contingency and Authority in Early U.S. Public Debate, Ph. D. dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, 2010.
36. Jacob Cooke attributed Cool Thoughts on the Subject of the Bank (Philadelphia: Charles Cist, 1786) to Tench Coxe, in the appendix to his volume but without a detailed analysis. Cooke generically attributed some anonymous pamphlets to Coxe on the basis of drafts found in the archival fund of Tench Coxe at Philadelphia; see Jacob Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), appendix. As has been shown, however, the pamphlet was a partial copy of the English pamphlet of 1710. I find it unlikely that Tench Coxe wrote the partial copy, because in Coxe’s microfilmed papers at the Library of Congress there are no drafts of this pamphlet. Moreover, there are contradictions between Cool Thoughts and Coxe’s Thoughts Concerning the Banks of North America. The author of the latter’s knowledge of Genoese history, which can be inferred from reading the pamphlet, does not fit with the knowledge of Genoese history displayed by the author of Cool Thoughts. On Cool Thoughts, see Inabinet, The Bank Controversy of the New Republic, 62–63. Neither Inabinet nor other researchers have drawn attention to the similarities between Cool Thoughts and the 1710 English pamphlet.
37. Janet Wilson, “The Bank of North America and Pennsylvania Politics: 1781–1787,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 66, 1 (1942): 3–28.
38. Coxe, Cool Thoughts, 2.
39. Coxe, Cool Thoughts, 8.
40. Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, 1 (1993): 51–84.
41. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy, 23.
42. Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, vol. 1 (London: J. Walter, 1787), 329.
43. I am quoting here from the original manuscript, preserved in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, The James Madison Papers. Notes on Banks.