CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP
Presents:
Emily Nacol
University of Toronto
Political Science Department
“Vile Ways of Traffick:” Finance, Impropriety, and Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
12:30pm - 2:00pm
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
In this essay, I focus on representations of two types of labourers in early modern Britain: the stockbroker and the stockjobber. Both were objects of suspicion and even revulsion, figured as non-productive workers who traded in fantasy and speculation. By examining both written and visual representations of these figures in the early eighteenth century, I explore two overlapping pairs of ideas that were critical to early understandings of the trade in stocks as a “vile way of traffick,” morally distinct from other forms of exchange: manners and propriety, and labour and property.
Stockbrokers and especially stockjobbers were set apart from other types of commercial actors by lack of manners and their impropriety. They were prohibited from entering the Royal Exchange for much of the 1600s, due to their rough manners and impolite commercial conduct, which led them to set up a parallel market in the shops and coffee-houses of what eventually became known as Exchange Alley. Whilst they were able to carve out a substantial physical and commercial place for themselves in the emergent finance economy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they were unable to shed their reputations for rudeness and impropriety. They were never seen as commercial actors who displayed the capacities for self-command and self-government that were central to ideals of “proper” conduct in a commercial society. Relatedly, they were also held apart by their tenuous connection to commonly held notions of labour and property, the second pair of ideas that are central to this essay. Neither created material goods or material wealth in the traditional sense, and thus their presence strained common understandings of the relationship among productive labour, property, and exchange. The character of their labour, supported by the fiction of credit, was often conflated with other forms of suspect economic activity like usury and gambling and thus carried a heavy connotation of immorality or impropriety, along with risk.
In this essay, I explore these intersecting notions of manners, propriety, labour, and property by looking closely at some of the political, legal, literary, and artistic representations of stockbrokers and stockjobbers in Britain in the 1720s. In the aftermath of the Mississippi and South Sea financial crises, there was a proliferation of critical work on stockbrokers and stockjobbers that paint them largely as villains. A closer look at these representations moves beyond a simple story of villainy to open up a broader theoretical conversation about the moral cast of a finance economy and the special risks it invites. What counted as desirable labour in a new commercial economy of credit, debt, and financial speculation? How were traditional forms of labour made vulnerable by the rise of new financial institutions instruments and new professions, and how destabilizing was this? Do we see these representations of finance-related labour as persistent in our own time?
Emily Nacol is an assistant professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and in the Graduate Department at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the history of early modern political thought and political economy, with a focus on the problems of risk and uncertainty in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political and economic writing. Her first book, An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain was published in 2016 by Princeton University Press. She is working now on a new book about notions of labour and risk in Britain’s long eighteenth century.
For more workshop information, please contact events at events.law@utoronto.ca
