Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England
The Dark Arts of Projectors
By Valerie Hamilton, Martin ParkerJohn Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Valerie Hamilton and Martin Parker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-952-8
Contents
Acknowledgements,
1. Novels, and Banks, and Disciplines,
2. The Space of Composition,
3. Revolutions,
4. Invisible Hands,
5. The Projectors,
6. Conclusion: The Projected and Projecting Reader,
Endnotes,
CHAPTER 1Novels, and Banks, and Disciplines
'In weakness we create distinctions, then Believe that all our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive and not which we have made.' (William Wordsworth, c.1799)
Projects and projecting
A novel and an organization would generally be regarded as unrelated things, members of different categories. One deals in airy matters of fiction, the other in brute economic realities. This book explores the proposition that the novel and the organization share fundamental characteristics of form, function and technique. That is to say, they work in the same way. We explore this idea by comparing the emergence of an early English novel by Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), and an early English corporation, the Bank of England (1694). It seems to us that the period from which they emerged, sometimes called the 'Age of Projects' (1680–1720), is inherent in, and inherited by, the form of the novel and the corporation respectively. They are projects of a projecting age. The metaphor of the 'project', the risky adventure, is taken from Defoe's Essay upon Projects (1697) and is used as a lens through which to reveal the entangled relationship between the novel and the corporation. The eighteenth-century 'projector' would now be called an 'entrepreneur'; but in the eighteenth century the figure had not yet gained the mythological proportions which it attains in the late twentieth century. The darker side of the projector was well recognized. This was someone who was admired and feared. A schemer who engaged in fantastic speculation in order to convince others to invest in their imaginings, to give them credit and therefore substance. Fiction and fact relied on each other then, and it seems to us that the lesson of this book is that they still do.
Now we aren't the first people to enter this territory. There is a respected body of literary criticism and cultural history that establishes connections between the eighteenth-century novel, finance, and capitalism, and we build on these insights. However, our specific focus on the organization, the corporation, allows us to compare the beginnings of two institutions that have shaped the modern world. Significantly, we try to avoid taking too academic an approach and instead enact or reconstitute the interdisciplinary relationship between fact and fiction in the telling of this tale. So, dear reader, don't only approach this as a history lesson about the beginnings of contemporary capitalism, but also a confabulation about the relationship between fact and fiction. The very idea of there being separate domains of culture and of economy is challenged by the story we will tell. As the Canadian cultural studies academic Max Haiven puts it, Marx's term 'fictitious capital' is more than an offhand dismissal of something he doesn't like, but can also be understood as a description of the ontology of capitalism itself. Money is made with fiction and narrative, just as fictions and narratives can be sold for money.
This relationship is belied by the gulfs of incomprehension that currently divide univers
