Britain in the ‘long eighteenth century’ was the stage for some of the most momentous phases in the emergence of modern capitalism, from the founding of key financial institutions, to stock market crashes, rapid urbanisation, the beginnings of industrialisation, and the expansion of empire. This chapter will trace the often formative role of imaginative writing in conceptualizing monetary and socio-economic transformation. Prior to the division of disciplines, figures such as Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville moved between modes now differentiated as ‘literary’ and ‘economic’ while, at the end of the period, even exponents of emergent political economy such as Thomas Malthus and Jane Marcet felt called to answer the representations of a poet, and a verse satire helped to shift government economic policy. Literature engaged with changing economic realities, framing and contesting the new centrality of credit, producing metaphors that marked the route to a ‘de-moralised’ economic science, or alternatively exploring the causes and consequences of wealth inequality.
Keywords
credit, urbanisation, empire, metaphor, industrial revolution, charity, inheritance, poverty, marriage settlement, landed property.