Paper Money and the Fear of Excess in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Paper money occupied a deeply ambivalent place in works of British monetary writers in the late eighteenth century. On the one hand, writers like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham thought that paper money's ability to represent wealth in exchange without itself containing any intrinsic value was an unparalleled benefit to commerce and industry. On the other hand, having disburdened itself of any intrinsically valuable commodity, the abstract monetary sign of paper money gave rise to a fear of excess, a fear that in essence there was nothing which could limit its growth. In this paper, I will discuss the concept of paper money as it took shape in the writings of eighteenth-century British monetary writers, introducing the idea of a general economy of notes to help explore the ambivalent place it occupied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]