Gervase of Canterbury gives a detailed account of the fire that ravaged Canterbury Cathedral in the 1170s, after which an excerpt from the fire regulations published in 1212 in London after another major fire in the city is included. Building and repairs are exemplified by documents recording work done at WIndsor Castle and Westminster Abbey, as well as the accounts of payment made for repair to the clock on Westminster Palace, now replaced by Big Ben. Finally a contract is included between a builder and the authorities at St. Paul’s regarding the building of a large merchant’s house in the City of London, with details as to the plan of the house and the sourcing of the materials.

Chapter 2 explores the patterns of late nineteenth-century global capitalism through which a progressive, moral middle class built a system of professions. It uses the 1880s Melbourne land boom to show the sustained effect of the ‘great heaves’ of investment from the City of London into Australia, Canada, and the United States. This financializing economy – unlike earlier, short-term bubbles like Chicago’s in the 1830s – stimulated the global expansion of professional occupations. Older moral values infused the professions across the Anglo world as they grew and institutionalised. Retaining capitalism’s model of return on investment, the professional class made investment in humans the central professional ideal. Their class status was often concealed beneath layers of rationality and claims to expertise, but in the settler colonies they transformed capitalism into a form of moral investment for social return in ways that served their own interests first. As part of a global bourgeoisie, these transformations at the periphery of the Anglo world were soon also felt in the British metropole.

The high level of the Napoleonic military and financial threat concentrated the minds of different interests in Britain, ensuring broad cooperation. This enabled the government to tax the rich without serious resistance, thus furnishing the basis of war finance. Loans came from the City of London, which worked closely with the government. Contracts with contractors were generally well administered. Naval superiority enabled convoys to protect and maintain trade, and particularly to obtain specie from Mexico, much needed by Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula as well as for subsidies for continental powers. For the last two years of the war, the government had to deploy the talent and energy of Nathan Meyer Rothschild to ensure that the British army on the continent was paid. Despite periods of extreme political stress, financial confidence was never broken. Parts of industry thrived, trade flourished, infrastructure investment continued. The British economy finished the war in a healthy state, although the economic impact of financing the war had very long-term political effects.

This chapter argues that a logic of fiduciary exchangeability finds its most sustained and versatile expressions in the work of the celebrated London writer Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s work of the 1990s is both a crucial signal of a deepening intimacy between experimental and genre writing that has become all the more pronounced over the past two decades, and a leading-edge example of the techniques of market metafiction so prevalent today. The chapter reads Sinclair’s novel Downriver (1991), published in the wake of the Thatcherite transformation of the City of London’s financial services sector, as exploring what happens to structures of fiduciary circulation when they are pushed to – and beyond – their limits. The reading of the ostensibly non-fictional Lights Out for the Territory (1997) as an exercise in the “hermeneutics of speculation,” meanwhile, argues for the constitutive roles of faith and belief even in texts that apparently ground themselves in the real and material, in the process challenging the homology between literary realism and precious metal that is a basic premise of much key work in the New Economic Criticism.

This chapter argues that we might better understand postmodernism’s ambivalent appropriation of genre models by theorizing it in terms of a logic of quasi- or “as if” belief that cuts across structures of financial and literary market exchange. Taking recent work in economic sociology and the “New Economic Criticism,” as jumping-off points it shows how a deep-rooted kinship between fiction and finance as forms of writing that mediate value in the modern credit economy (in Mary Poovey’s terms) are becoming newly visible today. The shared condition of fictional texts’ and financial and monetary instruments’ successful market circulation is their solicitation of tacit faith or trust in imaginary things. A desire both to exploit and to subvert this condition of “fiduciary exchangeability” shapes the experiments in supernatural narrative form offered by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Lunar Park (2005), Anne Billson’s Suckers (1993), Stephen Marche’s The Hunger of the Wolf (2015), and Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010). In the work of these writers we see many of the crucial elements of market metafiction in action.