11
11.1. Law’s Schemes
During the decades between the foundation of the Bank of England (1694) and the First Bank of the United States (1781), Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, reappeared at the very moment when financial institutions were founded in France, and San Giorgio was again identified as a relevant model.
In 1714, Scottish gambler and economist John Law traveled to France and proposed his financial schemes to the kingdom’s regent, Philippe d’Orléans. Son of a goldsmith, Law had traveled extensively in Europe, dedicating himself to gambling and adventures. In 1694, he killed a romantic rival, Beau Wilson, in a duel in London, and managed to escape from prison and get to France. Later he traveled in the Netherlands and Italy. During his travels, Law became affluent and wrote various economic papers. His protectors there included the duke of Argyle and the Count de Stair, investors in the Darien Company―created, as mentioned previously―by William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England.1 Between 1708 and 1711, Law lived in Genoa. After settling in France and making a brief trip to the Netherlands in 1715, he proposed his scheme to the French court. Much of that scheme was planned in advance, but scholars are still uncertain about what he planned initially and what he later improvised.
Law’s proposed system would absorb, in three phases between 1715 and 1720, all the resources of the French state. In the first phase (1716 and 1718), he founded a bank that issued credit bills traded on the open market; in a second phase (1717–1719), he founded the Mississippi Company, which initially issued shares on the model of the EIC; in the final phase, the Mississippi Company absorbed the whole of French public resources and debt became private equity. The most intriguing and mysterious phase is the last one, and scholars still question whether Law planned it in advance.
Law’s schemes in France were initially rejected: in 1715 he proposed opening a public bank, but this project failed. He then founded a private bank that issued 1,200 shares at 5,000 livres each, acquiring one-quarter of the shares himself.2 The bank issued notes guaranteed by large deposits, first deposited by Law, later by other investors. The government encouraged the use of notes for some transactions. Investors sold them to tax collectors, who paid them cash in return (October 1716), and tax collectors used the notes to pay the government after their collection (September 1717). Law established the Mississippi Company to exploit the French colonies in Louisiana. He planned the Company’s first project in the early months of 1717 and was granted approval in August 1717, gaining permanent control of the Louisiana colonies and a commercial monopoly for 25 years. As he had for the bank, he launched a selling of shares. Investors paid a total of 29,000 livres, half of which Law bought himself. Since investors did not seem overly interested at first, the French regent added to the pool of money the income of a sort of stamp tax and, later, income from a tax on tobacco. The Mississippi Company then acquired the Company of Senegal, the Company of the Indies, and the Company of China. In August 1719, it acquired the right to rule the Fermes Générale and absorbed all of France’s public debt. In 1720, it acquired the Royal Bank, the Company of Santo Domingo, and the monopoly on slavery in Guinea.
This process of transforming debt into equity very closely resembles the schemes of San Giorgio, and past scholars have studied a kind of legend around the Mississippi Company’s origin.
11.2. Heinrich Fick and Earl Hamilton on Law’s Schemes
As described in the introductory chapter, the first scholar to identify San Giorgio as an early corporation was Heinrich Fick (1862). He was also the first to notice the link between San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company. Fick maintained that Law had created in France a bank like San Giorgio, showing how, through progressive transformations between 1716 and 1720, Law replicated San Giorgio’s model.
Law’s replica (Nachbildung) of the Bank of Saint George was first started in the modest form of an accomandita-joint stock company with the title Law & Company; only on December 4, 1718, did it become a corporation under the name Banque Royale; and finally, on February 22, 1720, it was merged with the ill-fated Mississippi Company.3
Fick analyzed the establishment and subsequent phases of Law’s scheme but did not explain how Law acquired knowledge of San Giorgio and replicated its characteristics. It is possible that he and other scholars at that time lacked the necessary research tools, but it also appears that he was not interested in searching for Law’s models and the ways he replicated them. Other German scholars of the same time—those studying the maona, San Giorgio, and early modern financial corporations—had a similar attitude. Their research was anti-chronological, focusing on the modern financial corporations and how they became efficient in the seventeenth century and onward. They derived these forms from the most recent cases, that is, the EIC and the VOC, and did not conceive of the possibility that earlier institutions might have influenced later corporations. Nobody at the end of the nineteenth century imagined corporation as just a concept invented to fit various kinds of situations, and that other institutions, in similar or different situations, might have influenced each other through a path-dependency process. I hypothesize that this was a reason that the spread of models or their characteristics was not studied at the time.
Some decades after the German scholars, the American economic historian Earl Hamilton (1899–1989) returned to the links between San Giorgio and John Law’s scheme. Without knowing about the earlier German tradition and Fick’s hypothesis regarding Law’s schemes, Hamilton reached similar conclusions. After working on the price revolution of the sixteenth century, he spent decades, starting in the 1950s, studying John Law’s financial schemes. The research was time-consuming and expensive, and at the end of years of work, Hamilton had published only two short articles.4 He was greatly helped by two women who until now have remained unknown to scholars. They were his wife, Gladys, and an archivist of the Minutier Central (the French national archives in Paris) Madeleine Jurgens, whom Hamilton paid with funds from wealthy institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation.5 Madeleine Jurgens was so loyal to Hamilton that she strenuously defended his work. In 1957, when the Ecole des Annales was interested in studying John Law, Jurgens wrote to Hamilton:
I would like to inform you immediately that Mr. Labrousse persists in his idea to undertake some research and a dissertation on the economic repercussions of Law’s system on the bourgeoisie of Paris. He gave the charge to Mister Braudel to write to you on this topic. I do not know yet who will write the dissertation, but I learned this morning that the research has started, because the person in charge of this research has some problems with the paleography of 1715. Mr. Labrousse obtained from the Scientific Research permission to allow someone do some research in the Minutier; Mister Furet, the young professor whom I already mentioned and who is doing a dissertation on the bourgeoisie before the Revolution, has oriented the first research survey on the 1780s and the following years; now Mr. Labrousse has given the order to sift through the years 1715 and later.6
Antoin Murphy, John Law’s biographer, has written that the absence of a monograph on John Law remains a mystery.7 After surveying the sources, it is difficult to know whether François Furet (1927–97) was in fact the scholar chosen by Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) to work on John Law. Labrousse, a famous historian who studied pricing history, had announced at the International Conference of Historical Science in Rome—two years before this letter to Hamilton—that he planned to initiate a large project to study the bourgeoisie in the years before the French Revolution.8 The bourgeoisie did later become the focus of Furet’s wide-ranging work. Madeleine Jurgens’s letter about the activities of Furet and Labrousse goes on to mention the role of Fernand Braudel in mediating between Labrousse and Hamilton.9
It is possible that—at least in the period when the letter quoted earlier was written—Jurgens’s defense of Earl Hamilton’s right of “first consultant” in the archives prevented Labrousse, Braudel, and other historians from researching John Law.
But there is also a wider reason: French works on the financial history of early eighteenth-century France are quite rare, especially when compared with other places and historiography―for example, with English works on the English Financial Revolution. One reason could be that French finance was much less famous than finance in countries such as the Netherlands and England. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the figure of John Law attracted a wide array of works by antiquarians and writers of fiction.10
Earl Hamilton’s work may have prevented other studies from appearing in the middle of the twentieth century, but his work stimulated later scholars. Antoin Murphy, Law’s careful biographer, has worked extensively on Hamilton’s manuscript papers, and Larry Neal, who has done innovative research on Law and the English South Sea Company, was inspired by a problem noted in Hamilton’s archive.11
John Law has also fascinated various other scholars, but as François Velde pointed out, his schemes have not yet been studied in depth.12 In his biography, Antoin Murphy mentions that Law traveled to Genoa before moving to France and presenting his project. He has also advanced the hypothesis that the Mississippi Company was connected to San Giorgio’s model.13 However, there is not even a footnote in the work to support this hypothesis.
My research started from the striking similarities between the Mississippi Company and San Giorgio noted by Heinrich Fick and Antoin Murphy. These similarities included tax farming, the issuing of notes instead of money (for San Giorgio, see Chapter 1), and more generally the fact that state creditors federated themselves together to manage the shares and progressively extend their power. San Giorgio gradually acquired the prerogatives and rights of the state (the Commune) and became a corporation; the Mississippi Company transformed debt into equity, that is, it changed shares of public debt into shares of a corporation.
My research into Earl Hamilton’s papers has led to the discovery of a real point of contact between San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company. Hamilton wrote in one of his drafts:
Law … was powerfully influenced by the Compere of Saint George and their Bank of Saint George at Genoa. He had lived, traded and grown up in Genoa in 1708–1712 and had kept substantial accounts in the Bank of Saint George … he was thoroughly familiar with the advances by the Bank to the city of Genoa, the huge indebtedness of the city to the bank, to the farming of taxes by the Compere.14
Hamilton’s notes are the result of several years of research in European archives. The paper quoted here contains new information: John Law had accounts with the Bank of San Giorgio and knew how San Giorgio worked.15 I hypothesize that this is part of a draft of a book that Hamilton never finished and that Antoin Murphy, who had access to Hamilton’s papers, used this information when he wrote that Law was probably inspired by San Giorgio. Hamilton’s draft paper can also shed light on another link between the two institutions. In 1711, John Law was in Turin—then the capital of the Duchy of Savoy—at the court of Vittorio Amedeo II, hoping to propose the implementation of his financial schemes.16 Among the various memorials that the ministers of the House of Savoy had collected and studied in those days, there are two quite detailed seventeenth-century texts on San Giorgio.17 The fact that these two memorials were physically stored with Law’s plans and his accounts with the Bank of San Giorgio is precious tangible information that scholars can use to infer that knowledge of San Giorgio did indeed circulate.
Scholars of economic and social history have studied and discussed transfers of know-how extensively.18 As with the practices and techniques of artists and artisans, it is difficult to track the circulation of commercial knowledge, because traders rarely left traces of how they founded an institution. Even when scholars possess information like that presented earlier and notice a resemblance between two institutions, it is difficult to say whether a financial model did or did not circulate. It is likely that Earl Hamilton faced this problem when―after decades of research—he wrote a simple unpublished draft with a vague hypothesis of resemblance between San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company. This was also the case with Antoin Murphy: both men noted a similarity but lacked the evidence to prove it.
My research has moved in the same direction—noting the resemblances between the two institutions—and has looked, again, at the reappearance of the Machiavellian scheme.
11.3. Law and Genoese Traders
Focusing on the life of John Law between 1708 and 1711, as noted, Hamilton discovered that Law held accounts with San Giorgio.19 Financial operations also took place with the help of Genoese intermediaries between 1716 and 1719, after Law had left Genoa. While Law was director of the Banque de Paris, he became engaged in business with the Durazzo family in Genoa. Original letters by John Law and copy letter books of the Durazzo family, which show the family’s correspondence with Law, are preserved in the Durazzo-Giustiniani archive in Genoa, but have not been studied.20 The relationship started with Marcello Durazzo (d. 1717); his sons Filippo and Giuseppe later established a partnership with John Law to exploit wood in the forest of Cisterna, in the area of Agro Pontino, south of Rome. The wood was acquired by a Pisan merchant, Diego Vergassoni, who shipped it to the French Navy to use as construction material for ships.
Law’s relation with the Durazzo brothers was less close than the relation he had maintained with their father.21 Law tried to use his acquaintance with the brothers to sell them shares of the Mississippi Company, but they were suspicious.22
Other information on Law’s business affairs and life can be inferred from the Durazzo family archives. When dealing with Law, the brothers used various financial agents, including Cambiaso & Ferrari and Massone & Rapallo in Paris; the agent Philibert in Lyon; Andrew Pels in Amsterdam; William Law, John Law’s brother, in London; and Benjamin Barband & Sons’ bank in Genoa.23
In 1711 John Law moved to Milan, to the parish of San Giorgio al Pozzo Bianco, near Porta Venezia. This previously unknown and unstudied fact can be inferred from a power of attorney that Law issued and registered for the British counsel, George Henshaw, who dealt with Law’s business in Genoa. The witnesses to the registration of the power of attorney included the brothers Ippolito and Gio Battista de’ Mari.24 Ippolito was Law’s agent in Genoa, and he is often associated with Law in the secondary literature.25 In fact, it was from Milan that Law unsuccessfully proposed to the Duke Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy the idea, mentioned previously, of a bank.26
11.4. The Machiavellian Scheme
In 1720, Daniel Defoe, the famous author of Robinson Crusoe, published the Chimera, a pamphlet criticizing the Mississippi Company scheme of absorbing the French public debt. Defoe’s argument is one of the earliest criticisms of the nonmaterial characteristic—the fictional essence—of public debt.27
Much has been written on early modern finance as a fictive, nonmaterial, and imaginative practice; and since Defoe wrote on finance and is considered a key figure in the history of the novel, scholars have suggested that modern fictive finance developed at the same time as fiction (i.e., the modern novel).28 Defoe’s pamphlet is relevant to the research presented here because of the responses it incited. In 1720, not long after the collapse of the Mississippi Company Bubble, the anonymous pamphlet Some Considerations on the French Settling Colonies on the Mississippi was published.29 It maintained that Law’s schemes were not―as many authors had described them―“Novelties, Dreams, and Chimaeras,” since institutions similar to the Mississippi Company, including the companies of the East and West Indies, had existed in the past.30 The pamphlet also added that a more ancient, and thus supposedly more authoritative, institution also resembled the Mississippi Company:
It was first set on foot many years since, in the state of Genoa, for the same reasons, and with the same success that is now established in France … as Machiavel in his history of Florence informs us.31
The pamphlet referred to San Giorgio in Genoa, but did not mention the practical knowledge Law could have absorbed in Genoa while there; instead, it once again relied on Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. As described in Chapter 8, Machiavelli viewed San Giorgio as an institution federated by various creditors, that step by step acquired the majority of the territories of the Commune of Genoa, causing citizens to transfer their love from the Commune to San Giorgio. This in turn led to a weak state that was ruled by alternating factions or an external signory. Machiavelli’s last paragraph stated that it was:
An example truly rare, never found by the philosophers in all the republics they have imagined and seen: to see within the same circle, among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, civil life and corrupt life, justice and license.32
Some Considerations on the French Settling Colonies on the Mississippi included a translation of this paragraph to defend Law from accusations of having produced a chimera:
A most excellent and rare Thing, says the Historian [Machiavelli], never found out by any of the old Philosophers in their imaginary Forms of Government, that in the same state and same People, one might see at once both Liberty and Tyranny, Justice and Oppression.
The pamphlet thus used Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, to reply to Defoe’s accusations. Machiavelli’s example was historical and real—not a chimera at all. Machiavelli’s reference to the “republics they [the philosophers] have imagined” was used as a direct criticism of the Chimera; and since Machiavelli had written that San Giorgio was not an imaginative form of government and Law had taken inspiration from San Giorgio, the text implies that the Mississippi Company could in fact be a real institution.
An echo of Machiavelli’s passage is also present in pages John Law composed when proposing his scheme to the French regent, Philippe II d’Orléans. In this 1715 text, Law mentioned a series of banks and described the Bank of San Giorgio of Genoa as the best one. Its most relevant characteristic, according to Law, was that it was independent from the state and worked as a sort of detached republic (“la banque … est indépendante de l’Etat, et fait comme une espèce de rèpublique séparée”).33 As has been shown, Machiavelli’s passage was an analysis of the separation of powers between the Commune and San Giorgio; and Law’s statement that it “works as a sort of detached republic” referred to this separation, with the difference that Law used the term “rèpublique”—and not “Commune,” the term used in Genoa until 1528. It may be that Law knew Machiavelli’s passage or that he recalled a long tradition of text transmission in both Genoa and abroad.34
A third reference that connects John Law and his schemes to Machiavelli can be found in Law’s very detailed biography, published in 1720, The Memoirs, Life, and Character of the Great Mr. Law and His Brother at Paris by W. Gray. Though it has been quoted extensively by scholars, this book’s authorship has not been studied. It is possible that W. Gray is a pseudonym, as it does not appear in any biographical reference and no other texts refer to it. The information in the text, which came out near the collapse of the Mississippi Company Bubble when Law was still alive, is very specific, with a detailed knowledge of Law’s biography. Law’s presentation of the project to the French regent at court is described in detail, but at the point when the reader would expect some lines on Law’s scheme, Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, appears once again. The author depicts Law speaking before the regent, and then follows that with a paraphrase of Machiavelli’s passage:
Machiavell tells you, in his History of Florence, that the Republick of Genoa, after a long and tedious War with the Venetians, finding themselves unable to pay the large Sums of Money they had borrowed of their Subjects, thought it the best and honestest Way to set up a Bank to receive the Revenues of the Government, in which every subject was to have the Government, in which every Subject was to have a Stock to the Value of his particular debt, and a quarterly Dividend in Proportion, of the Gain accruing by that Bank, and this Bank was called the Bank of St. George.35
This detailed description of San Giorgio continues with its characteristics and the fact that the Commune (which the author calls “the Commonwealth”) relies on it. The passage ends with Machiavelli’s sentence on the ancient forms of government and the opposed terms that described the relation between San Giorgio and the Commune.
A most excellent and rare thing, says Machiorvel [sic], never found out by any of the Ancients in their several Forms of Government, that in the same State and same people one might see at once both Liberty and Tyranny, Justice and Oppression.36
At the end of November 1719, James Craggs, postmaster-general in London, received a letter from Thomas Crawford, the British Resident in Paris. Crawford mentioned that Law was very nervous because a newspaper had characterized Law’s scheme as a chimera.37 Law tried and failed to discover which newspaper was involved. He wanted to respond, but Crawford had counseled him to wait. It is possible to hypothesize that Some Considerations on the French Settling Colonies on the Mississippi—the pamphlet that used Machiavelli’s passage on San Giorgio to defend the Mississippi Company against Defoe’s Chimera—was written and published by John Law himself. Both the pamphlet defending Law and the biography by W. Gray were published ten years after the publication of The Vindication (1710), the pamphlet written against the foundation of the Bank of England. The Vindication used San Giorgio as a negative model, while Some Considerations saw San Giorgio positively. The other main difference was that while the earlier English pamphlet summarized Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, paying particular attention to San Giorgio’s control of territories, the texts defending John Law’s schemes did not address the issue of territorial powers, which is noteworthy, since territorial control was the characteristic that made San Giorgio such a dangerous corporation. As that feature receded, it becomes possible to hypothesize that San Giorgio transformed from a negative to a positive paradigm in the decades between the founding of the Bank of England and John Law’s efforts to create the Mississippi Company.
Notes
1. Claude-Frédéric Lévy, Capitalistes et Pouvoir au Siècle des Lumières. Tome Deux. La Révolution Libérale 1715–1717 (Paris, La Haye and New York: Mouton éditeur, 1979), 115.
2. François R. Velde, Government Equity and Money: John Law’s System in 1720 France, paper online, www.heraldica.org/econ/law.pdf (accessed February 11, 2022).
3. “Laws nachbildung der Bank des Heiligen Georg trat zuerst unter dem bescheidenen gewande einer kommanditen-aktiengesellschaft, unter der firma Law u. Comp. auf, erst am 4 Dec. 1718 wurde sie unter dem titel Banque Royale zur Korporation, um schliesslich am 22 Febr. 1720 mit der verhängnisvollen Mississippi Gesellschaft verschmolzen zu werden.” Heinrich Fick, “Über Begriff und Geschichte der Aktiengesellschaften,” Zeitschriftfür das gesamte Handelsrecht 5 (1861): 1–63, 42 (my translation).
4. Antoin Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), particularly the paragraph “The Hamilton Enigma,” 11. Earl Hamilton published two essays on John Law: “John Law,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9 (New York: The Macmillan Co. & the Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968); Antoin Murphy, “John Law of Lauriston: Banker, Gamester, Merchant, Chief?,” American Economic Review 57 (1967): 273–282.
5. Hamilton’s papers suggest that his wife and Madeleine Jurgens—rather than Hamilton himself—completed the majority of the transcriptions.
6. “je vous annonce tout de suite que M. Labrousse persiste dans son idée de faire des dépouillements et une thèse sur les répercussions économiques du système Law sur la bourgeoisie Parisienne. Il a chargé M. Braudel de vous écrire à ce sujet. Je ne sais encore qui fera la thèse, mais j’ai appris ce matin que les dépouillements avaient commencé, parce que la personne chargée de ces dépouillements avait des difficultés avec la paléographie de 1715. M. Labrousse a obtenu de la Recherche scientifique des crédits pour faire faire des recherches au Minutier, M. Furet le jeune professeur dont je vous ai déjà parlé et qui fait une thèse sur la bourgeoisie avant la Révolution avait orienté les premiers dépouillements sur le années 1780 et suivantes; or subitement M. Labrousse vient de donner l’ordre de dépouiller les années 1715 et suivantes.” Earl Hamilton’s private papers. I wish to thank Larry Neal and François Velde (Federal Reserve Bank, Chicago), who provided me with access to them. Earl Hamilton’s archival material is now kept at Duke University.
7. Murphy, John Law, 5.
8. On the Rome conference and Labrousse’s paper, see André Burguière, L’École des Annales: Une histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Jacob Odile, 2007). I am quoting from the English edition, Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 2009), 110. On the interest of the Annales, the bibliography is quite extensive. See at least Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), with the assistance of Brian J. Reilly, The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Hans Cools, Manuel Espadas Burgos, Michel Gras, Michael Matheus and Massimo Miglio, La storiografia tra passato e futuro, Il X congresso internazionale di Scienze Storiche, Roma 1955, cinquant’anni dopo. Atti del convegno internazionale. Roma, 21–24 settembre 2005 (Rome: Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia, 2008). I could not find any trace on Labrousse’s attempt to start a research project on John Law.
9. Earl Hamilton’s papers: “Tout le monde s’agite à propos de ce dépouillement: M. Labrousse, M. et Mme Villard, M. Braudel: tout le monde prétend que vous [Hamilton] ne verres aucun inconvénient à ce que quelqu’un travaille sur votre sujet, mais M. Labrousse ne doit pas être très tranquille puisqu’il a chargé M. Braudel de vous écrire. Pour moi, je défends fermement vos droits de premier consultant avec une ténacité toute française.” (“Everyone is agitated about this research: Mr. Labrousse, Mr. and Mrs. Villard, Mr. Braudel: everyone claims that you [Hamilton] have no problem with someone working on your subject, but Mr. Labrousse must have some qualms about it since he has asked Mr. Braudel to write to you. For my part, with typical French tenacity, I firmly defend your rights as first consultant.” [Translation mine.])
10. Paul Harsin, Les doctrines monétaires et financières en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1928); Paul Harsin, Crédit public et banque d’état en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: E. Droz, 1933); Edgar Faure, La Banqueroute de Law: Gallimard (Paris: Éditions originales, Gallimard, 1977). Among the novels, see Antoine François Prevost d’Exiles, Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (Amsterdam: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1731); Emerson Hough, The Mississippi Bubble: How the Star of Good Fortune Rose and Set and Rose Again (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1902); Cendrine De Portal, Les Fortunes de la gloire: Le roman de John Law (Paris: Acropole, 1982).
11. Antoin Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Larry Neal, “I Am Not Master of Events”: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
12. François Velde maintained that the John Law case had been studied “but not (in my estimation) in a way that does full justice to the economic issues.” Velde, Government Equity and Money, 1.
13. Murphy, John Law, 42–43: “In Genoa he [Law] would have been able to study the Compania [sic.] or Casa di San Giorgio… . The inspiration for many parts of the Mississippi Company was probably kindled in Law by his study of the Bank of Saint George.”
14. Earl Hamilton’s papers; the document is not inventoried. The emphasis is mine. “Compere” refers to San Giorgio, also named Casa delle Compere di San Giorgio.
15. Carlo Taviani, “An Ancient Scheme: The Mississippi Company, Machiavelli, and the Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1720),” in Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, Special Issue of Political Power and Social Theory 29 (2015): 239–256. I wish to thank Davide Gambino, who has identified Law’s accounts in San Giorgio’s ledgers and Earl Hamilton’s notes, which are still in San Giorgio’s ledgers.
16. On the presence in Turin of Law and his proposing his schemes there, see Antoin Murphy, John Law, 115, 117, 120, 122; Antoin Murphy, “John Law’s Proposal for a Bank of Turin (1712),” Economies et Sociétés, Série Oeconomia 15 (1991): 3–29; Domenico Perrero, “Law e Vittorio Amedeo II di Savoia,” Curiosità e ricerche di Storia Subalpina 1 (1874): 24–71.
17. The Informazione del sistema della Casa di San Giorgio di Genova con un progetto per il stabilmento in questa città di un cambio e la Relazione data al serenissimo prencipe Maurizio di Savoia, in nome del quale fu richiesta dal S. Mag. francesco Grimaldo per Magci III Jacobi uno degli Ill.mi protettori l’anno 1637 con permissione de SS. Protettori medesimi a quali fu letta. I am quoting from Earl Hamilton microfilms.
18. For a bibliography on the circulation of commercial and financial knowledge and the role of intermediaries, see at least, Robert Muchembled (ed.), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), particularly the essays by Francesca Trivellato, “Merchants’ Letters Across Geographical and Social Boundaries,” in Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80–142; Donatella Calabi and Derek Keene, “Exchanges and Cultural Transfer in European Cities,” in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Muchembled, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 286–314 (with specific attention to architecture); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). From the perspective of New Institutional History, see Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy, in particular 187–216; from the perspective of Organization Studies, see Walter Powell and Paul Di Maggio (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
19. Earl Hamilton’s papers, private archives not yet catalogued.
20. Original letters of John Law are in 136 and 137. ADGG, AD, 213, 214, 215, 216.
21. ADGG, AD, 215.
22. ADGG, AD, 215.
23. ADGG, AD, 137. For Benjamin Barband & Sons, see ADGG, AD, 214.
24. The document was found by Davide Gambino, who collaborated with me on a project on John Law in Genoa, funded by the Università di Trento. ASG, Banco di San Giorgio, Banco secondo di numerato, 4100 [17,14100].
25. Larry Neal, “I Am Not Master of Events”: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
26. Perrero, “Law e Vittorio Amedeo II di Savoia,” 37. Law wrote from Milan to the duke of Savoy on March 12, 1712.
27. Defoe’s position on the English financial systems is not clear. In Fair Payment No Spunge, Defoe defined the English public debt to be a chimera; but in The South-Sea Scheme Examin’d he took a more cautious attitude toward the South Sea Company, which was similar to the Mississippi Company. Some observers have argued that Defoe was more open-minded later on because he had invested in the South Sea Company. See Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century. Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 190.
28. Sherman, Finance and Fictionality, 190.
29. Some Considerations on the French Settling Colonies on the Mississippi (London 1720, reprinted with preface by the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Cincinnati, 1928). Originally attributed to James Smith, this attribution was criticized in the preface to the 1928 edition (p. 8).
30. “I shall just observe that the basis which supports them all [Law’s schemes], viz. the king’s granting to the united East and West-India Companies a Lease of the general farms, is not so new a project, as I am persuaded these superficial Politicians take it to be,” Some Considerations on the French Settling Colonies, 13.
31. Some Considerations on the French Settling Colonies, 13.
32. Banfield and Mansfield, Florentine Histories, 352.
33. John Law, Œuvres de J. Law contrôleur-général des finances de France, sous le régent; contenant les principes sur le numéraire, le commerce, le crédit et les banques: avec des notes. da John Law (Paris: Chez Buisson, 1790).
34. See Part III § 8.3. and Savelli, “Tra Machiavelli e S. Giorgio,” 249–321.
35. W. Gray, The Memoirs, Life, and Character of the Great Mr. Law and His Brother at Paris (London: Printed for S. Briscoe, 1721), 20.
36. The passage of Machiavelli used in this pamphlet differs from that in Some Consideration on the French Setting Colonies by a few words, but both quote only two of the three pairs of opposed terms that refer to the relation between the Commune and San Giorgio: “Liberty and Tyranny, Justice and Oppression,” but not the “civil life and the corrupt life.” This similarity may suggest a similar trajectory.
37. TNA, SP 78/165/172, ff. 484–485. Crawford to Craggs (November 29, 1719), 484. I wish to thank Stefano Condorelli who found these papers and brought them to my attention.