The general problems of private and public finance

The period from 1660 to 1720 witnessed a remarkable transformation in the commercial and financial status of London, which began to take on increasingly that indefinable institutional characteristic conveyed by the later term ‘City’. The emergence of the metropolis as the leading centre of business, a concentration of ‘monied interests’ as contemporary writers liked to describe those with investible wealth, not only gave it a unique place in the economic and political life of the nation but also raised its status in the hierarchy of the European banking world. If the foundation of the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609 pre-dated that of the Bank of England (1694) by nearly a century and pointed to the relative English backwardness in financial matters in this period, the rapid progress made by the Bank during the first two decades of the eighteenth century also symbolised the pace of London's new commercial and economic growth. Less spectacular but equally evident was the changing position of the English East India Company in these critical years. From a condition of chronic capital starvation, the reference to which fills the pages of its court minutes during the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, the Company had reached the point by 1709 when it could subscribe a loan of more than £3 million to the Treasury and raise a similar sum in short-term loans from the public at home and abroad for its trading needs.