The making of institutional credit in England, 1600 to 1688

In seventeenth-century England, most proposals for new banking institutions focused on addressing contemporary obstacles to creating confidence in the proposed institutions. In proposals for banks of charity in the first half of the century, bank proposers were concerned primarily with usurious pawnbrokers, and with ameliorating the problems they caused. In proposals for Lombard banks that appeared in the 1650s, proposers employed terms such as ‘pawn’, ‘fund’, and ‘security’ rhetorically in emphasizing the security of the envisioned institutions. The struggle for confidence over the course of the century shows that institutional credit neither emerged fully formed nor swept disorder away.