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Finding the Money: Public Accounting, Political Arithmetic, and Probability in the 1690s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2013

William Peter Deringer
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Abstract

“Finding the money”—whether money lost, hidden, or needed—became a defining practical and epistemological problem in the decade after the 1688 Revolution. It was a problem that linked together actors in fiscal administration, parliamentary politics, and economic theory, and drove innovative new applications of numerical calculation to political reasoning. In the debates on monarchical revenues that arose in 1689, a crisis of knowledge engulfed Parliament as MPs discovered how few among them had any insight into the nation's fiscal well-being. A parliamentary Commission of Public Accounts, formed in 1690, learned that even a basic financial assessment was extraordinarily difficult. Yet the commission's travails also revealed numerical calculations to be a potent political tool, which empowered relative outsiders to make incisive criticisms without complete information. Such combative political computation was systematized in the “political arithmetick” of Charles Davenant, who provided a novel political rationale for the value of “probable” knowledge.

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Journal of British Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 638 - 668
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013 

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59 For example, William Bridges, commissioner of Provisions for Ireland. Harley MS 1488, f. 68v, BL.

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66 Harley MS 1488, f. 52v, BL.

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68 Harley MS 1488, f. 99r, BL.

69 Harley MS 6837, f. 165r, BL; Harley MS 1488, f. 103r, BL.

70 Harley MS 6837, f. 165v, BL. Baxter suggests Squib knew more than he let on. Baxter, Development, 235–36.

71 Squib attended the commission on other matters. Harley MS 1488, ff. 120r, 171r, BL.

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74 Based on the published records of Jephson's Secret Service accounts, it appears that the chancellor of the Exchequer sporadically reviewed Jephson's Secret Service accounts before passing them on for royal approval. However, there is little reason to believe that such audits produced duplicates or summary accounts for the general use of the Lords. See Shaw, CTB, 17 (1702): 528, 534, 547, 560, 626.

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98 One manuscript in Lowndes's Papers confirmed that “the Estimates and appropriations for the years [1688–1689] were few and imperfect.” “A Computation of the charges for land and sea services from the 5th of Nov. 1688 to the last of Decr 1690…” TNA, T 48/87, f. 210. See also Shaw, CTB, 9 (1688–92): cxiii–cxxiv, cxxix–cxxxvii; Brooks, “Taxation,” 115.

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121 Ibid., 300.

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126 Ibid., f. 38r.

127 Ibid., ff. 38v–39r.

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132 Davenant, Discourses, 1:266.

133 Davenant, Ways and Means, 46–47.

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137 Ibid., 121.

138 Ibid., 120.

139 Ibid., “Scheme,” 74.

140 Ibid., 95.

141 Ibid., 95–96.

142 Ibid, 99–102; “Scheme,” 102.

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147 Ibid., 30–31.

148 Ibid., 15–16.

149 Ibid., 50.

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156 Davenant, Discourses, 1:9–10. Davenant hinted a better “computing faculty” might save “a great Expence in Embassies, or Spies in Foreign Courts.”

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161 McCormick, Petty, 177–78, 206, 302.

162 Davenant, Discourses, 1:27.

163 Charles Davenant, “A Memoriall Concerning the Free Trade Now Tolerated between France & Holland” (unpublished, 1705), Harley MS 6798, f. 46v, BL; emphasis mine.

164 Cf. A Probable Calculation of the Annual Income to be Raised by a Tax on Marriages, Burials, and Legacies (printed, [1690s?]), in TNA, Gregory King Papers, T 64/302, no foliation.

165 Hacking, Emergence of Probability, 1.

166 Petty was interested in using numbers to discern laws governing the social world and was far less concerned about numerical evidence qua evidence or the questions of inference central to modern statistical thought. McCormick notes that Petty did not intend political arithmetic as a rigorous “statistical form of social analysis.” Statistician Anders Hald writes more directly: “Petty did not contribute new methods of statistical analysis.” See McCormick, Petty, 206, 220–21; Hald, A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750 (New York, 1990), 105Google Scholar.

167 Davenant was like other early modern practitioners of the “low sciences” (alchemists, astrologers, and physicians) who developed new concepts of “evidence” in trying to diagnose internal processes from external “signs.” See Hacking, Emergence, chaps. 4–5.