DEFOE, Daniel.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected, First edition of one of Defoe's early economic works, including his reflections on the reformation of the East India Company in 1697. Opposition to stock-jobbing informed much of Defoe's later writing, and his economic thought even influenced literary works like Moll Flanders. The text is scarce in commerce: we can trace just two others in auction records.Stock-jobbing - the professional trading of capital shares on an exchange - developed swiftly after the explosion of joint-stock companies following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The first stock prices were published in 1692, and the London Stock Exchange was founded in 1698.During the same decade, the newly founded Bank of England suffered a run that virtually exhausted its coinage supply. While modern historians attribute the run to the withdrawal of old, clipped currency, Defoe emphasizes the sinister activities of stock jobbers during the crisis: "Till the ready Money began to appear again, the Brokers and Jobbers made a Prey of all Mankind in the matter of bills; and in spight of the endeavours of the Bank or the Exchequer, they bought and sold their Notes at the shameful Discount of 10, to 16 and 20l. per cent" (p. 2).In a socio-economic analysis of Moll Flanders, Lois A. Chaber argues that the novel's cast of mercenary, deceptive characters illustrates Defoe's contention that "bourgeois are rogues. Defoe would have probably regarded as a truism the Marxist equation of capital

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