Representing Public Credit

Public credit was controversial in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. It entailed new ways of thinking about the individual in relation to the State and was for many reasons a site of cultural negotiation and debate. At the same time, it required commitment from participants in order to function. Some of the debates relating to public credit, whose success was tied up in the way it was represented, find their way into contemporary fiction – in particular the eighteenth-century novel.This book reads eighteenth-century fiction alongside works of political economy in order to offer a new perspective on credible commitment and the rise of a credit economy facilitated by public credit.