Impunity And Capitalism: The Afterlives Of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830

Description

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault. Cover Half title Title Copyright Contents Figures Maps Tables Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Preface | Impunity at the Origins of Financial Capitalism 1 | Professionalizing Impunity Introduction Sovereign Impunity: The Situation Before 1709 The Five Grievances of the Hogguer Brothers Mr. Badhouse Goes to Amsterdam Conclusion: The Chambre de Justice Revisited 2 | The Crisis of 1720 and the Invention of Discredit Introduction The Bubbles Bubble the Bubblers Occupy Exchange Alley: Thinking About Injustice in the Aftermath of 1720 Conclusion 3 | Between Independence and Impunity Introduction Unintended Consequences: Law’ s Proposals for a General Bank Interpreting the Crisis Conclusion Part II Preface |Revolutionary Impunity 4 | The End of the Old Financial Regime, 1781–1793 Introduction The Eruption of Impunity at the End of the Old Regime How to Break Everything Completely From Legal Exceptions to Political Exceptions Conclusion 5 | Recasting Financial Capitalism, 1796–1821 Introduction The Fall and Rise of International Private Banking More Than One Way to Make a Central Bank Restriction and Discretion on Threadneedle Street The Bank and the Gallows, or, the Ballad of John and Catherine Keene Conclusion Part III Preface |The Gold Standard and Impunity with Stability, 1815–1830 6 | The Panic of 1825 and the Systematization of Impunity Conclusion | Monetary Policy as Conscience Management Introduction The New System The Bubble of the 1820s The Panic The Regulatory Aftermath Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Archival Collections Published Primary Sources Unpublished Theses and Working Papers Secondary Sources Index