CHAMBERLEN, Hugh.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Papers relating to a bank of credit upon land security proposed to the Parliament of Scotland. One of two editions, this a quarto of eight pages, the other a folio of 20 pages, without established priority. Part of the series of publications in which Chamberlen promoted his land bank scheme, which he first proposed in 1690. England had by this stage rejected his proposals, and so he turned to Scotland, which would also reject them, as too would Ireland in the following years. ODNB summarizes his plan thus: "Landowners would be issued with paper money equivalent to the value of the land they held, in the assumption that, because all paper money corresponded to a piece of land, it would be secure... His plans were mathematically flawed, as he thought that lending could occur on the basis of one hundred times the annual rent of the land, and he was not able to appreciate the inflationary effects. When the alternative measure, the Bank of England, was set up in 1694, other land bank campaigners - such as his friend and adviser John Briscoe - modified their schemes, but Chamberlen remained interested in a pure land bank. By 1699 he had gone into exile, possibly because of debt, settling first in Scotland, where he continued to issue pamphlets offering variations on a land bank and developed a plan to unify England and Scotland, and then in 1705 moving to the Netherlands, where he died after 1720" (ODNB). Very scarce - ESTC locates copies of this edition in only seven institutions

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