Restoration commerce and the instruments of trust

Abstract

Although the theological elements of Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy have received careful scrutiny, his reflections on economic issues have largely been overlooked. This article takes a small step towards redressing this state of affairs. Rather than argue that Boyle – like John Locke or David Hume – was as interested in political economy as he was in discovering the nature of Nature, the article treats him as a point of entry for considering how early-modern England negotiated the revolutionary cultural and economic changes that emerged as capitalism took command. More specifically, it uses one of Boyle’s less-famous inventions – a hydrostatic device for discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit coinage – in order to explore how economic exchange began to acquire a patina of ‘objectivity’ in the 17^th-century imagination.

Keywords

Robert Boyle economic history exchange value natural philosophy political economy

Not so long ago, historians of science took pains to distinguish between the ‘core’ scientific work of a figure like Isaac Newton and his ‘extra-scientific’ writings on biblical prophecy or alchemy. Indeed, Margaret Jacob remembers vividly the audible gasps and hostile questions that greeted Richard Westfall as he first began to present his research on Newton and alchemy at conferences in the 1970s (Jacob, 2004: x). However, contemporary historians now take it for granted that the challenge is to make holistic sense of a figure’s idiosyncratic web of beliefs (e.g. Ben-Chaim, 2001). As Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs observed: ‘one result of the restricted interests of modernity has been to look askance at Newton’s biblical, chronological, and alchemical studies: to consider his pursuit of the prisca sapientia as irrelevant. None of those were irrelevant for Newton’ (Dobbs, 1991: 7).

Similar historiographical principles have forced scholars to reconsider the wisdom of teasing apart the narrowly philosophical interests of early-modern figures like John Locke and David Hume from the broadly economic questions that also attracted their attention. As a case in point, George Caffentzis has argued that the innovative portrait of madness that Locke developed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding also provides the framework for his analysis of money in Second Treatise of Government (Caffentzis, 2003).¹ So too, Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind remind us that although we typically think of David Hume as the author of Treatise of Human Nature or Dialogues on Natural Religion, in his prime ‘Hume was as well if not better known for his contributions to political economy, particularly for the essays published as the Political Discourses’ (Schabas and Wennerlind, 2008: 217). Even Newton’s brief but aggressive tenure as the Warden of the Mint has drawn interest for its potential to throw new light on his experimental pursuits (Westfall, 1994; Levenson, 2010).

So while it is incorrect to argue that Boyle was preoccupied with economic matters, it is also incorrect to say that he ignored them (e.g. Clericuzio, 1990; Hunter, 2009). Steven Shapin has even argued that – except for perhaps Isaac Newton himself – ‘no English life was more influential in forging the identity of the new scientific practitioner than Boyle’s’ (Shapin, 2010: 131; see also Shapin, 1990, 1994). It is curious, then, that although the theological elements of Boyle’s mechanical philosophy have received careful scrutiny (e.g. Ben-Chaim, 2002), his reflections on economic issues have largely been overlooked.² One possible explanation for why scholars have written so little on Boyle and matters of political economy is that, when compared with Locke or Hume, he simply was not all that interested in economic affairs (Oster, 1994). Although this is true up to a point, it is not quite right. For example, Boyle’s own alchemical pursuits have been well documented by Michael Hunter, William Newman and Lawrence Principe (Hunter, 1990; Newman and Principe, 2002; Principe, 1998). In an era of specie-based currency, successfully transforming base metals into gold would have had far-reaching financial implications that even the most ascetic naturalist could not have ignored (cf. Wennerlind, 2003). So while it is neither incorrect to argue that Boyle was preoccupied with economic matters, nor is it correct to say that he ignored them.

In what follows, I would like to take a small step towards redressing this state of affairs. I do not wish to argue that Boyle, like Locke or Hume, was as interested in political economy as he was in discovering the nature of Nature. Given the available textual evidence, that claim is frankly untenable. Rather, I want to treat Boyle as a point of entry for considering how early-modern England negotiated the revolutionary cultural and economic changes that emerged as capitalism took command.³ More specifically, I want to use one of Boyle’s less-famous inventions to explore how economic exchange began to acquire the patina of ‘objectivity’ in the 17^th-century imagination.

Sections I and II will offer a broad overview of Boyle’s ‘corpuscularianism’. The goal here is to underscore how, despite its explanatory promise, this mechanical vocabulary was unable to explain something increasingly important in 17^th-century England: the monetary or exchange value of gold. Section III examines early-modern philosophical curiosity about the nature of money against the backdrop of England’s long-standing currency crises. Finally, Section IV examines Boyle’s invention – a hydrostatic device for discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit coinage. My argument will be that Boyle’s hydrostatic instrument is the material realization of two tightly linked desires: first, to make market activity less risky and more predictable; and second, to excise these practices from their traditional moral, political and social frameworks. That is to say, Boyle’s invention represents an early attempt to replace morally complicated questions of trust with impersonal, instrumentally produced ‘matters of fact’ (cf. Shapin and Schaffer, 1985).

I Blacksmiths, God and the skillful ordering of nature

To a first approximation, 17^th-century corpuscularian doctrine asserted that the physical objects of material reality are composed of minute, subvisible particles. Although this intuition can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the genealogical relationship between the corpuscularianism of Gassendi, Descartes, or Boyle and the atomism of Democritus, Epicurus, or Lucretius is anything but clear. Christoph Lüthy submits that the fundamental obstacle preventing us from establishing tidy historical connections between the two camps is ‘that the “new sciences” of the seventeenth century are quite visibly overbrimming with atoms, corpuscles, and particles of all sorts’ (Lüthy, 2000: 446; see also Wilson, 2002). When Boyle took up the project of becoming a natural philosopher – sometime in the late 1640s or early 1650s – he appears to have had a kind of corpuscularian conversion experience. Michael Hunter has suggested that the incomplete fragment Of the Atomical Philosophy (c.1652–54) represents a kind of intellectual ‘threshold’ that separates the early Christian moralist from the mature Christian natural philosopher (Hunter, 1995).

Yet, despite this conversion, the atheistic implications of ancient atomism worried Boyle to no end (cf. Kim, 1991). From one perspective, atomism threatened to grant creative agency to brute matter rather than God by locating the origins of creation in atoms randomly cohering in space. From another perspective, it eliminated any role for God’s providential design by emphasizing that cosmological chance was responsible for some atoms combining into physical bodies. ‘That there is Local Motion in many parts of Matter is manifest to sense, but how Matter came by this Motion was of Old, and is still hotly disputed of’, he writes in The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666–67):

… for the antient Corpuscularian Philosophers, (whose doctrine in most other points, though not in all, we are the most inclinable to,) not acknowledging an Author of the Universe, were thereby reduc’d to make Motion congenite to Matter, and consequently coëval with it; but since Local Motion, or an Endeavour at it, is not included in the nature of Matter, which is as much Matter, when it rests, as when it moves; and since we see, that the same portion of Matter may from Motion be reduc’d to Rest, and after it hath continu’d at Rest, as long as other Bodies doe not put it out of that state, may by external Agents be set a moving again. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 306)

Thus, in contrast to the ancient enterprise, Boyle devised a novel corpuscularian vocabulary that required the providential workings of a God to create matter, assemble it in working forms and set it moving (see also Shanahan, 1988). As Margaret Cook explains, physical objects in this Boylean universe ‘had properties and produced effects that were awe-inspiring as works of the creator’s skill in fashioning them, but they had no inherent ability to function except as the moving parts of a mindless machine’ (M. Cook, 2001: 143). This strategy of explaining the causal properties of physical objects by appealing to the mechanical or ‘artifactual’ nature of corpuscularian reality is epitomized by Boyle’s reflections on the power of keys to open locks.

He begins by observing that keys and locks are little more than chunks of iron fashioned by a locksmith’s skill into particular shapes. Nevertheless, Boyle remarks, ‘in regard that these two pieces of iron might now be applied to one another after a certain manner, and that there was congruity betwixt the wards of the lock and those of the key, the lock and the key did each of them now obtain a new capacity’ (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 310). The crucial point to notice here is that no mysterious or hidden property must be added to the nature of a key in order for it to open a lock; it is only by virtue of its being a designed object with a specific shape, and its interaction with other equally designed objects with specific shapes, that the key possesses the special quality of unfastening locks. From this homespun example, Boyle draws an analogy that goes to the heart of his particulate, Christian vision of Nature:

I do not see, why we may not conceive, That as to those Qualities, (for Instance) which we call Sensible, though by virtue of a certain Congruity or Incongruity in point of Figure or Texture, (or other Mechanical Attributes,) to our Sensories, the Portions of Matter they Modifie are enabled to produce various Effects, upon whose account we make Bodies to be Endow’d with Qualities; yet They are not in the Bodies that are Endow’d with them any Real or Distinct Entities, or differing from the Matter its self, furnish’d with such a Determinate Bigness, Shape, or other Mechanical Modifications. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 310)

Rejecting the scholastic portrait of both form and matter as distinct but equally real kinds of substances, Boyle contends that there is only matter and its particular arrangement. The sensible qualities of matter, he writes, ‘proceed from those more Primary and Catholick affections of Matter, Bulk, Shape, Motion or Rest, and the Texture thence resulting’ (Boyle cf. Keating, 1993). From this vantage point, the physical objects that make up the world’s furniture have specific traits because the ‘catholick and universal matter’ that composes them has been fashioned into precise shapes by the hand of God. Indeed, all corpuscles have some potential power or efficacy simply by virtue of having a particular profile that can interact with other corpuscles that have complementary profiles. The philosophical pay-off for this stance, Frederick O’Toole explains, is that it allowed Boyle ‘to establish that powers and capacities are not non-relational inherent properties of things, but rather are non-inherent relational properties of things’ (O’Toole, 1974: 307). Armed with this strategy of redescribing qualitative properties in terms of corpuscularian interaction rather than substantial forms, Boyle would take on one of the hobgoblins of early-modern natural philosophy: Aristotelian ‘occult’ qualities.

II Reducing the irreducible: Boyle and occult qualities

Keith Hutchinson argued in a now-classic article that 17^th-century natural philosophers did not simply banish ‘occult’ qualities from their working ontologies. Rather, they objected to the inherited scholastic notion that some features of the natural world were in principle inexplicable or unintelligible (Hutchinson, 1982). In fact, many early-modern natural philosophers took it as a point of epistemological pride that they could accept the enigmatic properties their forerunners had left shrouded in obscurity, and then go on to explain their natural causes. Yet, more often than not, these explanations were exercises in ‘promissory naturalism’ where the goal was to demonstrate how it was possible to explain a particular case (cf. Daston, 1991).

To see how Boyle’s version of promissory naturalism tames the metaphysically obscure relationship between substantial forms and occult properties – while at the same time preserving the transcendental necessity of a designer – consider his reflections on the skills of a blacksmith. ‘When a piece of Silver is by being hammer’d or drawn into wire made to be a springy Body, it will be able to act many things by that acquir’d Elasticity, which do not at all flow from the Form peculiar to the metal’, he notes:

And so when a Smith makes a File by making in it many little impressions a crosse one another, and afterwards hardning the Steel, by virtue of this roughnesse, which is given it by external Agents, it acquires a durable asperity, upon whose account it is qualify’d to perform many and considerable things, whereto the Form of the metal as such does not, that appears, concurre. And though the Hardness contribute to the making a good File, yet not onely the Iron was as true and perfect Iron before it became rough as afterwards, but even that degree of hardnesse, which qualifies our Instrument to be a good File, flowes not immediately from the Form of the metal, for that was true iron when it was soft, and its eminent degree of hardnesse was (as I freshly intimated) given it by the temper it receiv’d from the Smith. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 480)

There was nothing metaphysically spooky about silver’s springiness or steel’s hardness. These properties were no more ‘hidden’ in the metals’ ethereal Forms than key-ness or lock-ness were occult properties of iron. It was only by virtue of the blacksmith’s knowledge and labor that these materials become elastic or hard, are fashioned into key or lock. What these pedestrian examples suggest, Boyle concludes, is

… that even in occult Qualities, which are so generally presum’d to flow from the specifick Form of a body, it is not alwaies necessary that this Form should have any great interest (or perhaps any at all) in the operations; but that the Matter need but be duely excited and dispos’d by outward Agents to be enabled to perform them. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 480)

Right down the line, from the smallest watch-spring to the clockwork universe itself, where there was design there was a designer.

Armed with this theologically recalibrated version of corpuscularianism, Boyle was confident that nearly everything could be explained in mechanical terms – including the seemingly paranormal mysteries of the stars’ astrological influence, faith healing and the ability to foretell the future (Steneck, 1982; Kaplan, 1993; Henry, 1994; Hunter, 2001). There was at least one invisible quality, however, that resisted corpuscularian explanation because it could not be reduced to a specific arrangement of matter: the monetary or exchange value of gold.⁴

As one might expect, Boyle had no difficulty offering a promissory account of gold’s physical characteristics. Every physical body has a ‘peculiar manner of Existence’ by virtue of its specific corpuscularian structure, he writes, and this

Convention of Accidents is sufficient to perform the Offices that are necessarily requir’d in what Men call a Forme, since it makes the Body such as it is, making it appertain to this or that Determinate Species of Bodies, and discriminating it from all other Species of Bodies whatsoever: as for Instance, Ponderousness, Ductility, Fixtnesse, Yellowness, and some other Qualities, concurring in a portion of Matter, do with it constitute Gold, and making it belong to that Species we call Mettals, and to that sort of Mettals we call Gold, do both denominate and discriminate it from Stones, Salts, Marchasites, and all other sorts of Bodies that are not Mettals, and from Silver, Brass, Copper, and all Mettals except Gold. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 324)

Translated into a modern idiom, Boyle’s point is that scholastic philosophers commit a kind of Rylean ‘category mistake’ when they treat gold as an ontological substance distinct from, or non-identical with, its usual physical properties.⁵ Gold, like everything else in the world, simply is the sum of its corpuscular parts. So long as the metal in question passes the relevant tests, he notes, most natural philosophers and knowledgeable laymen ‘would upon the account of the Convention of the freshly mention’d Accidents let it pass Current amongst them, notwithstanding most Mens greater care, not to be deceived in a matter of this nature then in any other’ (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 323).

From Boyle’s corpuscularian perspective, however, the origin of gold’s exchange value remains an enigma. For one thing, the exchange value is not reducible to any of gold’s physical qualities. That is, gold’s exchange value is not essentially tied to its being yellow or malleable. For another, even though gold is just another form of metal, it cannot be replaced by a near-substitute without forfeiting some, or perhaps even all, of its exchange value. Boyle observes:

You ask a Man, what Gold is, if he cannot shew you a piece of Gold, and tell You, This is Gold, he will describe it to You as a Body, that is extremely Ponderous, very Malleable and Ductile, Fusible and yet Fixt in the Fire, and of a Yellowish colour, and if You offer to put off to him a piece of Brass for a piece of Gold, he will presently refuse it, and (if he understand Mettals) tell You, that though Your Brass be coloured like it, ‘tis not so heavy, nor so malleable. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 323)

On the one hand, unless shopkeepers and landlords are prepared to accept brass as gold – more specifically, as a means of payment equal to gold – only a fool would exchange one for the other owing to their nearness of color. On the other hand, if brass had the same value as gold the fact that it is less malleable would be irrelevant. Furthermore, in Boyle’s day there was enough uncertainty about whether gold was one or many that sometimes the real thing could be rejected as counterfeit – until, that is, it was adulterated to look like what the genuine article was supposed to look like. He tells us:

I was lately visited by an ingenuous Goldsmith of my acquaintance, who complain’d to me, that being wont to buy parcels of Gold brought in small pieces, and as it were sandy corpuscles, from Guinea, or some Country of that Coast, though he found it upon all tryals very right Gold, yet was it so very pale, that few but expert Goldsmiths would meddle with it, as fearing it had been some sophisticated Metal; adding, that this exceeding paleness of it sometimes reduc’d him to melt it with very high-colour’d Gold, or to heighten its tincture with that of Copper, to bring it to the colour of ordinary Gold. (Boyle, 1999–2000: II, 44)

Although gold is always the sum of its corpuscular parts, those parts are not always enough to guarantee its exchange value. What, then, could be the source of this peculiar power?

The amount of labor required to produce an ounce of gold could, in theory, have something to do with it.⁶ But if that were the case, Boyle asks, why is it that ‘Goldsmiths that onely give shape and lustre to Gold are far more esteem’d, and in a better Condition, than Miners, who find the Ore in the bowels of the Earth, and with great pains and industry dig it up, and refine it into Metall’ (Boyle, 1999–2000: VIII, 83)? It could be that the exchange value of gold rested on something as slight as a contract, a more-or-less arbitrary agreement between agents that they will collectively pretend that this material has ‘intrinsic’ value. After all, he suggests, whenever laymen

… distinguish any one Body from others, and refer it to this or that Species of Bodies, is nothing but an Aggregate or Convention of such Accidents, as most men do by a kind of Agreement (for the Thing is more Arbitrary then we are aware of) think necessary or sufficient to make a Portion of the Universal Matter belong to this or that Determinate Genus or Species of Natural Bodies. (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 323)

But, if this was the ultimate explanation, why insist that one metal is intrinsically more precious or more valuable than another? Indeed, why bother making money out of ‘precious’ metals at all? Exchange value threatened to remain as occult a property as ever.

III Metal, money and the puzzles of value

These kinds of ontological questions about the nature of money and value had preoccupied English pamphleteers, royal advisers and parliamentarians since Elizabeth’s reign.⁷ The local motivation for much of this reflection was to comprehend and correct for the long-term consequences of the ‘Great Debasement’ initiated by Henry VIII in the 1540s (cf. Chown, 1994; Caffentzis, 2003; Deng, 2011). One of the fundamental puzzles that needed to be resolved going forward was whether a coin’s value should be conceived as an intrinsic or extrinsic property. A bit more to the point, the question was whether money has exchange value because it is made with inherently valuable materials (namely, gold and silver) or because it is useful, facilitates exchange and bears the stamp of a governing authority.⁸

In A Discourse of the Commonweal of the Realm of England (1549, pub. 1581), for example, five representative Britons meet at the local inn.⁹ Around drinks they begin debating who should be held responsible for their increasingly dire economic circumstances. The learned Doctor, Pandotheus, is a mouthpiece for the intrinsic theory of exchange value. He insists that the Crown must answer for their sorry condition because it alone is responsible for the debasement of their money. The Doctor declares:

And now I must come to that thinge, that youe brother marchant touched before, which I take to be the cheife cause of all this dearth of thinges, and come of the manifest imporishment of this Realme, and might in breife time be the distruction of the same, yf it be not the rathere remedyede, that is the basinge or rather corruptinge of oure coine and treasure. (Anon., 1893: 69)

In other words, the English are poorer because their devalued coins are now worth less, if not worthless, in the marketplace. The Knight – who is a stand-in for the extrinsic theory of value – counters that this cannot be the case because money is nothing more than a collectively agreed-upon instrument designed to expedite exchange. ‘Forsowth, such a dullard ame I indede’, the Knight begins:

… that can not perceave what hinderaunce it should be to the Realme to haue this mettall, more then that, for oure coine; seinge the coine is but a token to goe from man to man. And sithe it is stricken with the kinges seall to be currant, what make it the mattiere what mettall it be of, yea thoughe it be but lether or paper? (Anon., 1893: 69)¹⁰

In this way, the Doctor and the Knight may be read as squaring off over a central early-modern issue: is money first and foremost a means for measuring and preserving value, or rather is it primarily an instrumental aid for economic activity?¹¹

The characters of Discourse eventually grant their begrudging assent to the Doctor’s position: namely, that money must first be ‘sound’ if it is to be useful. This fictional outcome more or less reflects the actual consensus within the Elizabethan halls of power regarding the nature of money (Palliser, 2014). One of the fiscal maxims apocryphally credited to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, is that a ‘realme cannot be rich whose coigne is poore or base’ (as quoted in Nares, 1828: 81). In the hagiographic Annales Rerum Gestarum Angliae et Hiberniae Regnate Elizabetha (1615), William Camden praised Elizabeth’s decision to replace the old, debased currency with newly minted coins that honored the traditional gold and silver standards that her father had shoved aside. The result, Camden cheered, is that ‘there hath been better and purer money in England than was seen two hundred years before, or hath been elsewhere in use throughout all Europe’ (as quoted in Nares, 1828: 81).

This Elizabethan reversal in monetary policy did not resolve all debate about the nature of money, however. Adjusting the amount and quality of gold or silver in a coin was just one method of currency manipulation. A sovereign might, for instance, produce coinage of the same weight and fineness but adjust the official exchange-ratio between gold and silver. The end-result could be an augmented or diminished nominal, legal value of coinage that was poles apart from its actual, market value as a lump of precious metal (Kindleberger, 1991). Paradoxically, one’s money could be worth more money as non-money. This is exactly what happened throughout the early Jacobean era, as England and Holland took turns enhancing the local exchange-rates of silver to gold – and then gold to silver, and then back again – resulting in what economists now describe as a series of ‘bi-metallic flows’ (Supple, 1957; Redish, 1990).¹² In this way, the institution of metallism posed another set of bothersome questions that even the most steadfast advocates of sound money could not easily answer.¹³ Did ‘fine tuning’ the exchange-ratio from time to time constitute a debasement? Or, did it represent a different kind of monetary sin? Should it be considered improper at all, or was it simply how international trade worked?

General philosophical interest in these matters further intensified in response to the pan-European economic contraction of the 1620s and the attendant depression at home (Gould, 1952; Supple, 1964).¹⁴ With the benefit of hindsight, King James’ decision in 1622 to establish three different committees to identify the downturn’s causes and chart a path forward begins to look like the founding event of early-modern English political economy (cf. Appleby, 1978; Finkelstein, 2000; Wennerlind, 2011). Although the 17^th-century observers were at odds over the underlying causes, they nearly all agreed that England was suffering from a ‘scarcity’ of money (Bowley, 1963). One member of parliament anxiously noted in 1621 that ‘the greater part have not wherewithal left to pay, and those that have money will not disburse it upon land or any other commodity’ (as quoted in Mayhew, 1999: 70). A bit more specifically, since silver coins were used in most day-to-day transactions that required cash, the general perception was that the English stock of silver money was inadequate.¹⁵ Rice Vaughan complained in A Discourse of Coin and Coinage (1622, pub. 1675) that the scarcity of silver coins was so acute that

… the weightiest hath been culled out, and transported or melted, and that which doth remain amongst us, is so light, as the lightness only doth preserve it in use, and the scarcity thereof is so great, that a many may go into a great many shops in London, of great Trade and Commerce before he shall get a 20 s. piece in Gold to be chang’d into Silver: and far the greatest part of all paiments is made now in gold, contrary to former times; whereas the true Rule for the good of the Commonwealth is, That there should be such a Proportion kept between Gold and Silver, as that they might equally abound, and of the two Silver most abound: the Reason whereof is, That the greatest part of the Commerce, is made in silver, the want whereof doth greatly prejudice the same. (Vaughan, 1696 [1675]: 71)

Gerard de Malynes pointed the finger at international bankers and artificial exchange rates as primary causes for the shortage (Malynes, 1622; cf. Harris, 1999). Edward Misselden argued that an imbalance of trade (i.e. too many imports, not enough exports) was responsible for the outflow of silver (Misselden, 1970 [1622]). Thomas Mun suggested that, in various ways, Malynes and Misselden were both on target and off the mark (Mun, 1630s, 1969 [1664]). Whatever the causes, however, the end-result remained the same: reduced consumption, pinched production, falling prices and diminishing profits.¹⁶

Depending on one’s point of view, the scarcity problem was either compounded by or skillfully negotiated through the practices of clipping, counterfeiting, shaving, sweating and washing coins (cf. Wennerlind, 2004; Valenze, 2006). As Ludovic Desmedt and Jérôme Blanc explain: ‘Individuals degraded coins in order to collect the metal and, consequently, either bring it to the mint (and obtain coins corresponding to weight of the metal, minus the possible brassage and seigniorage), sell it, or mint counterfeit coins by themselves’ (2010: 329). Collectively considered, these practices represent a kind of systematic currency manipulation from below; sometimes to exploit the gap between the nominal value of the coin and its actual metallic content, other times to resist the dislocating consequences of the nascent market revolution (Linebaugh, 2003; Wennerlind, 2004). These ‘crimes against money’ were capital offenses and so unlucky clippers routinely found themselves on the scaffold. For example, on 26 February 1679 Thomas Coxe and Charles Smith were both found guilty of treason ‘for Coyning and Counterfeiting, and also for Clipping of Money’.¹⁷ On 7 March 1679, they were both hanged at Tyburn – but not before the Ordinary advised those assembled that ‘Coyning counterfeit Money, was not onely [sic] a great Crime against the Kings Majesty, but an abuse to the whole Nation, especially the poor, whose wants could not be supplyed if they offered such bad Money in buying’.¹⁸

It has been estimated that the disparity between the legal values of English coins in circulation and the market value of the metal they contained – whether through intentional degradation or routine wear and tear – may have reached as much as 25 per cent (Sargent and Velde, 2001). ‘It was mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really a tenpence, sixpence, or a groat’, Thomas Macaulay would later write in The History of England (1849): ‘it may well be doubted whether all the misery which had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments, and bad Judges, was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings’ (1914 [1849]: 2567). A rose known by any other name may still have been a rose, but in 17^th-century England one could never be certain if a shilling was a shilling.¹⁹

IV Money, credit and instruments of trust

The tide began to turn with the Restoration of Charles II. According to Samuel Knafo, ‘it was finally Charles II, after acceding to the throne in 1660, who decided to undertake a profound revision of the old paradigm of financial governance in a bid to reconcile his own financial interests with the pursuit of sound money’ (2013: 87). The campaign to overhaul the English monetary system and revitalize commercial activity moved on several fronts at once. Royal charters for trading companies – which had been set aside during the Interregnum – were renewed. New production machinery and techniques were introduced at the Mint with an eye towards eliminating the threats of clipping and shaving. To boost the domestic forces of production and consumption, new denominations and new coins were created: the guinea and the half-guinea, references to the West African origins of the gold used to manufacture them.²⁰ New policies were crafted, eliminating seigniorage and guaranteeing that the full weight of the metals delivered to the Mint would be returned in coinage (Challis, 1992: 351). Taken together, these innovations produced a seismic shift in England’s stock of money. For example, it is estimated that a mere £37,000 in silver was minted in 1666. The Mint more than tripled that output two years later, minting around £124,000 of silver coins in 1668. Over the next decade or so, the Mint’s yearly average would hover around £138,000 (ibid.: 340). For a moment, at least, Edmund Waller’s fawning encomium of Charles II appeared to be close to the mark:

Justice, and truth, with you return again; The city’s trade and the country’s easy life, Once more shall flourish, without fraud, or strife. (1730 [1660]: 129)

With the monarchy restored, the Mint reformed and commerce revived, some of money’s ontological oddness began to dissolve.²¹ War with the Dutch may have loomed on the horizon, but for the time being a pound was a pound was a pound.

This tangled monetary history was the backdrop for Robert Boyle’s announcement in 1675 that he had invented a new instrument capable of discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit guineas. The device grew out of his hydrostatic experiments of the 1660s exploring the behavior of liquids with different specific gravities (Sargent, 1995). The new design tinkered with his previous laboratory ware, which had consisted of a blown-glass flask with a thin, exaggerated neck and a spherical base. One could use glass for the new instrument, Boyle observes, but ‘tis not easie to meet with Artificers that can give Glass the right bigness and shape, those, as all other Instruments of glass, being very frail and subject to be broken’ (Boyle, 1999–2000: VIII, 534). Thus, he recommends paying a bit more up front to have it constructed from copper or silver.

The bottom consists of two concave plates, ‘exactly soder’d together in the middle’, with a small hole drilled at each of the poles (see Figure 1). A slender, four or five inch, capped pipe – solid or hollow, depending on the design – is passed through the top and is soldered into place. Either a ‘screw’ or ‘stirrup’ is passed through the bottom and also soldered to create a watertight seam. Both options work equally well, Boyle explains, but the screw has the distinct advantage of securing coins to the apparatus more reliably. With a properly constructed instrument in hand, the first step is attaching a genuine, full-weight guinea, submerging the entire globe in a vessel of water, and then marking where the water’s surface touches the top stem. From there it is simply a matter of replacing the genuine coin with one in question and once again submerging the ball. The ‘Principles and Lawes of the Hydrostaticks’ could be counted on to take care of the rest (Boyle, 1999–2000: V, 207).

Figure 1.

Boyle’s hydrostatic invention (Boyle, 1999–2000: VIII, 540).

By virtue of using specific gravity to do the work, the instrument was able to determine whether a coin is made of genuine gold at the same time that it tested ‘whether the Coin have the just weight the Law requires’ (Boyle, 1999–2000: VIII, 538). However, like any good salesman, Boyle goes on to argue that his invention does much, much more. ‘And yet it may be further consider’d, that our Instrument does more than it need pretend to’, we are told:

… it presently shews, that the propos’d Guiny, if it be not counterfeit, is otherwise abused; and though it does not clearly determine, whether that likewise proceed from the want of specifick Gravity in the Metal, or from the Coins having been washed or otherwise fraudulently lessen’d, yet it probably resolves the doubt, because, if the want of weight appear by the Instrument to be very great, as it usually does where the piece has been robbed of some of its substance, (especially if it be so much as is reported of some Guinies, that of late are said to have been found wanting to the value of near four shillings;) ‘tis a strong Presumption, that ‘tis rather washed, &c. than counterfeited. (Boyle, 1999–2000: VIII, 538)

Here was an objective solution to the twin monetary evils of counterfeited (e.g. alloyed) and degraded (e.g. washed) currency. But simplicity, reliability and multi-functionality were not the only virtues. It was also inexpensive. ‘The cheapness of these slight Instruments being considered’, Boyle counseled, ‘it may be expedient for Goldsmiths and others, that have frequent occasions to examine various sorts of Coin, to have a several Instrument adjusted for each of them, to save themselves some pain and trouble’ (Boyle, 1999–2000: VIII, 542). If that seemed unnecessary, however, with a few minor adjustments a single instrument could be used to test the authenticity of half-guineas, silver crowns, half-crowns, and even ‘divers forreign Coins’ (ibid.: 532). As a result, he suggests, the mere presence of the instrument in a shop might provide a strong deterrent for the capital crimes against money: ‘For, men will scarce venture their Lives to steal but three or four grains from a true Guiny, and much less from a false one. And they that counterfeit, are not wont to be so sparing as to make their Coins too light’ (ibid.: 538). If anyone was bold or desperate enough to try, of course, there was always room for one more on the Tyburn Tree.

Considered from one angle, Boyle’s gadget for testing the authenticity of England’s post-Restoration money stock is little more than a historical curio – something on the order of Benjamin Franklin’s invention of a flexible urinary catheter (Isaacson, 2003: 132). However, considered from another, his invention provides a unique point of entry to a collective order negotiating the disruptions that were generated as ‘buying and selling became so urgent and prevalent, and efficient, that the exchange relationship emerged as a dominant form of social intercourse as well as an equally dominant form of social thought’ (Zakim and Kornblith, 2012: 1).²² It goes without saying that a transformation this far-reaching involved a vast number of innovations, modifications and substitutions at every imaginable level (cf. Wrightson, 2000). Nevertheless, one of the most fundamental was the attempt to isolate the practices of production, exchange and consumption from their ceremonial, moral, political and social settings in order to be reimagined as wholly financial events.²³ This process of analytic dissociation can be briefly illustrated by the history of credit.

Painted in broad strokes, the story that emerges from recent scholarship entails a gradual and uneven shift from one culture of credit to another (Hoppitt, 1990; Muldrew, 1998; Sullivan, 2002; Ito, 2011; Poovey, 2008). Within the traditional order of things, the primary form of commercial credit was extended between individuals within a single community, based on trust, and often secured by nothing more than the borrower’s promise to repay. Within the novel culture, however, we find that the dominant form of commercial credit is extended through public or private bureaucratic institutions that base their decisions on risk assessments and secure their interests through legally binding contracts. The importance of trust and credibility begin to fade from view as credit becomes a precisely enumerated financial instrument. Craig Muldrew observes that, as these organizations systematically reorganized the shape and scale of early-modern markets, ‘increasingly credit came to depend as much on the rationally determined future profitability and the accumulated physical or monetary capital of an enterprise’ (1993: 182).

The ascendant modern culture of financial credit helpfully gestures toward a more general transformation of early-modern economic activity and social imagination. That is to say, the increasing anonymity and ‘financialization’ of credit relations highlight the bid to represent all economic activity as a number of discrete, ‘objective’, quantifiable transactions far removed from the jumbled, ‘subjective’, qualitative relationships between people. In this regard, the potential significance of Boyle’s invention is thrown into dramatic relief when we take into account just how messy catching a 17^th-century clipper could be.

Very few of those actually tried for the crime were apprehended in the midst of passing off manipulated coins. One reason for this is that, given the worrying material state of the money supply, only a well-trained eye could distinguish a good counterfeit from the genuine article. Apart from a coin’s apparent ‘lightness’, shopkeepers often had nothing more to guide them than an inchoate hunch that something was amiss. Perhaps someone was looking to change money and was a bit too insistent about what she would accept. This was the case in April 1678, when

A Shoop-keeper without Temple-bar hath oft observed a little Girl come to him to change five or ten shillings of small money into greater, as six pences or shillings into half-crowns; and that she would not take any Mill-money, nor money that was clipt: whereupon he watching the Girl, in Fleet-street saw one of the Prisoner s (her Mother) waiting for her, who sent her into several shops in Fleet-street on the like Errand. At last he dogg’d them into an house near Stonecutters-street in Sho lane, very suspitiously scituate.²⁴

However, more often than not, clippers and counterfeiters were discovered only after a trusted confidant tipped off the authorities.

For instance, Christian Woodward’s mode of operations consisted of melting stolen silver plate purchased on the black market and forging it into bogus currency. This enterprise required a reliable source of silver and so, we are told, ‘she held correspondence with the most noted Theives, amongst whom one having a long time been eminent both for House-robbing, and Exploits on the Highway, being now reclaimed and allowed his Pardon, that he might discover the rest of his Gang, did now come to give Evidence against her’.²⁵ In other words, to save his own neck from the hangman’s noose one of Woodward’s partners in crime became an eager informant. When the police arrived to search her house, they were amazed by the size of her coining ambitions. ‘They found several large parcels of Plate that had lately been stolen from several Persons of quality, and of which Publique notice had been given,’ we learn, ‘a parcel of melted Silver, and a Book of Receipts, whereby it appeared what Vast quantities of Plate had passed through her hands, Besides there was found in her possession, about 300 pound in Silver.’²⁶ As was the custom for women found guilty of capital crimes, Woodward was burned at the Smithfield stake on 24 October 1679.²⁷

One might expect there to be little honor among thieves, but even the most intimate relationships could provide the evidence required to seal the accused’s fate. As a case in point, on 21 April 1680 Ralph Cook stood trial for counterfeiting. We are told that he

… unlawfully Coined several new Mill’d half-crowns, to the number of seven, which were proued [sic] to be made out of Pewter Plate, part of which plate was produced in Court, he being betrayed by his wife, who declared it to her Landlord, who caused him to be apprehended, and his Room searched, in which they found a casting Mould, a Flask, and several engraving Tools, and seven half crowns with some other Instruments. He had been formerly a Baker, and was brought into that vicious practice as he said, by a certain person in Stafford-shire, so that the Treason being proved against him not only by his Wife but his Landlord and the Constable, he received the Verdict as Guilty of High-Treason.²⁸

There is no indication why Cook’s wife betrayed her husband’s confidence, but it seems reasonable to suppose that their home was not a particularly happy one. In an era where separations were rare and divorces were nearly impossible, the death of a spouse was often the only way out of a bad marriage (Crawford and Gowing, 2000: 163). Where the woman from St Giles described below was sheltered from prosecution because she was presumed to be a good wife, Cook’s prosecution was virtually guaranteed because he had been a bad or at least undesirable husband. He was hanged and quartered at Tyburn on 28 April 1680, alongside a convicted rapist and a handful of burglars.

Yet, occasionally, these untidy social relationships could tilt the scales of justice in the accused’s favor. For example, an unnamed woman from the St Giles district of London stood accused of clipping in October 1677. As the court summary explains:

‘Tis supposed her Husband was the person that did actually Clip, and that her business was to get Money in fit for the purpose. It being prov’d that she often chang’d Mill-money for other, but always desired that which was large, or otherwise would not take it; which occasion’d suspition [sic], and her apprehension: which alarming her Husband, he fled, and cannot be heard of. There were taken in her Lodging abundance of Files, Melting pots, and other Implements of that kinde, produced in Court. However, because under such Circumstances, our merciful Laws, in favour of Marriage, are pleas’d to suppose the Wives act to be done by Coertion of the Husband, and that he by flight had acknowledged his own Guilt, she was brought in not guilty of the Treason.²⁹

Based on this brief report, there seems to have been virtually no doubt that the woman was an active co-conspirator. Therefore – in some basic sense – she was guilty of the crime. Yet, the court apparently reasoned that by virtue of being a submissive and obedient wife she did not deserve to be treated like a criminal. The transgression’s social setting was as important as the transgression itself.

Viewed against this convoluted legal landscape, Boyle’s hydrostatic instrument is a material expression of the growing late-17^th-century attempt to excise market behavior from its traditional moral and social frameworks. This shift in behavior and thought goes by many names. Yet, I find E. P. Thompson’s description of this calving process in terms of the ‘de-moralizing of the theory of trade and consumption’ particularly apt (1971: 89). By the systematical draining away of all of the ‘non-economic’ moral and social dynamics that surrounded market behavior, all that was left behind were pure ‘economic’ transactions that could be described mathematically. Everything that was relevant for buying and selling, lending and borrowing could now be captured by the techniques of double-entry bookkeeping.

The otherwise occult exchange value of gold could be substituted with an objective mark on a copper globe, which bore mute witness to the fact that a particular coin was – or was not – a genuine guinea. A shop owner’s decision to accept a guinea or half-guinea as payment was no longer based on something as ephemeral as trust or reputation. The selling point of Boyle’s device was that market exchanges could now rest upon an impersonal, instrumentally produced ‘matter of fact’ that was beyond doubt or worries about an individual’s credibility or creditworthiness. The only trust that was required for the revitalization of post-Restoration commerce was in the hydrostatic laws of Nature.

Conclusion

Hyman Minsky liked to say that although money can be made out of anything by anyone, the central problem is getting other people to accept it. One way of glossing his point is to observe that – instead of a commodity – money is essentially an IOU. Parsed in technical terms, this implies that within a single economic network we should expect to find a range of IOUs distinguished by various degrees of liquidity (i.e. ability to extinguish a liability), convertibility (i.e. ability to exchange one IOU for another) and acceptability (i.e. ability to count as payment). According to Dimitri Papadimitriou and Randall Wray, Minsky’s insight is important because it draws our attention away from the thingness of money and towards the hierarchies of money things

… ranked according to acceptability, with the government’s own IOUs at the top, then those of commercial banks, next the liabilities of other types of financial institutions, and finally the IOUs of nonfinancial firms as well as households at the bottom. Further, the IOUs of those lower on the pyramid are normally ‘redeemed’ for those higher in the pyramid; another way of stating it is to say that one usually extinguishes one’s liability by payment of a liability issued by an entity higher in the pyramid. (Papadimitriou and Wray, 2010: 9; cf. Wray, 2012)

What this means is that the practices of IOU-swapping – of buying and selling with money – are, were and will always be embedded in social relationships to one degree or another. It is only when IOUs are converted into a commodity such as gold that these liabilities become de-monetized and the social relationships they represent concluded (Wray, 2004: 254). Ironically, then, metallism represents a kind of anti-social theory of anti-money.

If one wishes to reconvert that commodity into usable money there is only one choice: give up the security of a practically useful thing and return to the convoluted social world of debt-mediated relationships. It should go without saying that these relationships, like all human relationships, are inherently risky propositions. Our confidence is misplaced. Our trust is betrayed. Our loyalty is abused. As Shakespeare observed in Coriolanus:

He that trusts to you, Where he should find you lions, finds you hares; Where foxes, geese: you are no surer, no, Than is the coal of fire upon the ice, Or hailstone in the sun. (Shakespeare, 1998: 216 [I.i.171–5])

In the midst of our perilous social lives, the presence of money only increases the stakes. One strategy for both minimizing and exploiting the presence of risk – in other words, to effectively manage it – is systematically to diminish the amount of trust and dependency that is extended within any single relationship. As capitalism took command in early-modern England, reorganizing the shape and texture of collective life, one expression of this stratagem was the attempt to de-moralize and de-personalize economic activity by representing shaky social debt relationships between human beings as objective and predictable relationships between things. Among contemporary historians, the broad consensus is that the cultural history of credit illustrates this general tendency. Boyle’s hydrostatic instrument, I believe, materializes it.

No matter how long and convoluted it may be, there is a line of continuity that runs from Boyle’s appeal to the hydrostatic laws of Nature to resolve money’s ontological strangeness and Milton Friedman’s brash assertion that the quantity theory of money is akin to the law of gravity (Friedman, 1980: 19). The centuries-long desire to erect a rigorous science of economic activity has, once again, hit a rough patch. Indeed, a recent study by a team of International Monetary Fund researchers demonstrated that not one of the 62 national recessions that began in 2008–9 had been predicted by economic forecasters (Ahir and Loungani, 2014; cf. Hindmoor and McConnell, 2013). In an earlier examination of economic predictions throughout the 1990s, a similarly damning conclusion was reached: ‘The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished’ (Loungani, 2001: 419).³⁰ With the benefit of hindsight, all of the Nobel prizes and disciplinary accolades offered in recognition of the ‘Great Moderation’ begin to look delusional rather than merely premature. However, for the critics of modern economic theory, this is no time for Schadenfreude; too many lives have been upturned by what Alan Greenspan coolly described as a ‘fatal flaw’ in ‘the risk management paradigm’ (2010: 7).

Whether we are considering something as clunky as Boyle’s 17^th-century invention or as sophisticated as the Black-Scholes formula, the lesson seems to be this: the desire to eliminate the human dimensions of buying and selling, or lending and borrowing, with the aid of money is perpetually frustrated by the social nature of money itself. At the end of the day, any science of money will likely remain an all-too-human science.

Footnotes

Notes

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