Money in the "Body Politick" : The Analysis of Trade and Circulation in the Writings of Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmeticians

This article discusses the analysis of trade and circulation in the writings of seventeenth-century political arithmeticians. Political arithmetic was in its way an anatomy of the social body. William Petty titled his 1672 book The Political Anatomy of Ireland. In his preface he explicitly claimed to be following Francis Bacon, highlighting the experimental method and the idea that analytical methods can be transposed from one discipline to another. He thus drew a parallel between the natural body and the body politic. It was a widely held idea that money guaranteed the nation's health; conversely its poor state of health could lead to the wasting away of the body politic. Accordingly, the events of the last decade of the seventeenth century saw many publications on the nature of money and credit and the specific role of banks in this field. While it seemed obvious to many observers that money was beneficial to trade, the mechanisms by which money was part of the economy still had to be clarified. The connection between political arithmetic and a conception of money as an accelerator of trade and of business is particularly evident in the works of Petty and Charles Davenant. Both authors took the same approach: from an evaluation of the national wealth they looked at the conditions of circulation of money in the national body and insisted on the need for better management of its flow. It is not the substance that cash is minted from, its metallic content, that matters, but the way credit is able to stimulate business and increase employment. This was not just a question of quantity, but also of quality. The needs of commerce called for ingenuity on the part of merchants and financiers to sustain the level of activity.