The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain

FAIN: HB-289030-23

Abigail L. Swingen
Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX 79409-0006)

Research and writing leading to a book about the British financial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Scholars usually associate Britain’s Financial Revolution with the creation of the national debt, public credit, and sophisticated taxation mechanisms on the part of the British government to help pay for complex and expensive military endeavors at the turn of the eighteenth century. My book, The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain, will consider long-term economic, political, and social changes in Britain and its empire that made a revolution in finance possible and will explore the political and cultural consequences of these changes. Based on original research and a synthesis of existing scholarly literature, the book focuses on moments of political and cultural crisis from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s to explore how and why a revolution in finance occurred in early modern Britain and how contemporaries understood and responded to it. Its main contribution will be its focus on popular responses to major fiscal and financial changes.