Small Credit and the Financial Revolution in England

In early modern Britain, there were multiple credit markets, including commercial credit, “small” or locally circulating credit, and from the late seventeenth century, a national debt. All of these different forms of credit have received historiographical attention, but often they are considered in isolation, rather than in relation to one another. Yet the British credit market was more than the sum of its parts. Different investment opportunities coexisted and competed with each other. This chapter builds upon and extends previous studies of “crowding out” to consider the relationship between small credit and newly available national investment opportunities that became available as part of the burgeoning Financial Revolution in the late seventeenth century. Focusing on the records of one individual in a small port town on the south coast of England, Samuel Jeake, it considers how middling creditors, who served as important financial intermediaries and lenders within their local communities, negotiated different credit markets. When opportunities to invest in government debt through lotteries, Bank of England stock, and East India Company stock presented themselves, Jeake chose to shift his assets away from lending locally to investing in these new financial instruments. He pursued his local, small debtors aggressively and shifted his assets to London. Though Jeake’s experiences represent just one voice within a complex and extensive credit market, his choices suggest that the Financial Revolution may have crowded out the small credit that local households depended upon in order to get by.