"A due Circulation in the Veins of the Publick": Imagining Credit in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

The financial costs of England's extensive military activities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were enormous and dominated public spending. Paper credit became more prevalent and more visible, and the forms it took became more diverse. The destabilizing effects of what has become known as the "financial revolution," with its non-land-based investments and speculations, were seen to be far-reaching the "counters" of language "into marketable commodities" and threatening that "all men, and all sublunary things, will now become things of paper."