Printers’ products and services contributed to an economic transformation of startling range and complexity. The ‘English miracle’ was part of broader British developments, coaxed by changing political frameworks across the three kingdoms and by expansion overseas. At the close of the seventeenth century, England exported goods to the value of ￡6.5 million per year and imported goods worth about ￡6 million. By 1816, English, Scottish and Irish exports were worth ￡39 million in official (constant price) values; imports were worth ￡33.6 million. An English and Welsh national income of about ￡48 million in 1688 compares to a combined English, Welsh and Scottish national income of ￡232 million on the eve of Irish union in 1801. By 1815, textiles, comprising almost four-fifths of total exports, were as dominant a proportion of exports as they had been in 1695, but cotton, not wool, was now king. As a result of colonial consolidation, particularly in the West Indies, the re-export of tobacco, sugar and other overseas produce comprised about a third of all exports from the 1690s until the early 1770s. By then re-exports roughly equalled the value of all domestic exports to Europe.

With the Navigation Acts ensuring that colonial primary produce was sent directly to the home country and not to other European markets, a quarter or more of all imports to England and Scotland were re-exported in the years prior to 1775. The value of the entrepot trade was halved during the American revolutionary wars, but British naval supremacy ensured an impressive re-export recovery during the European wars after 1793. Between 1814 and 1816 just over a quarter of all goods sent out from English ports were re-exports. Industrial production was based on textiles (predominantly wool and later, cotton), the manufacturing industries of shipbuilding, construction, metal smelting and refining, and a variety of derivative finishing trades. In 1700, Sir Ambrose Crowley’s Sunderland iron factory was the largest in Europe, nine years before Abraham Darby established his famous works in Coalbrookdale. In the same decade an average of 16,000 tons of iron were imported and 1,600 tons of iron and steel were exported each year.

Through the mediation of print, propertied gentlemen and gentlewomen, principal customers of the booksellers, viewed economic progress in their world and the moral implications of new wealth and new methods of business. With eighteenth-century presses providing more people with more information upon economic matters than ever before, a broad range of readers were offered unprecedented advice on how to conduct their financial affairs and how to understand the nature of commerce. Newspapers, pamphlets, manuals and magazines popularized current intellectual debate, often absurdly simplifying intricate propositions but also widening their audience and inviting public response. Booksellers and compilers made handsome profits from handbooks on trade and financial management. Such commercial venturing was not without its effect on the manner in which arguments were presented and counsel tendered.

The ‘gentleman reader’ was also a consciously constructed ideal. Many of those reading the commentaries on the economy were women and many of the propertied added to or resisted the ascription of gentlemen: clerics, scholars, merchants, lawyers, other professionals. Many owners of land and capital did not conform to the ‘gentlemanliness’ increasingly characterized in literature and drama. The literary fashioning of social stereotypes during the eighteenth century focused particularly on the negative, in which the avaricious tradesman, or the man or woman of all too rapid or squandered wealth, became the butt of jokes and a caricature of rapacity and idiocy. Yet the goal of many of those penning these stereotypes was to defend moderate wealth creation and point to ideal values by demonstrating the limits of proper behaviour. Those limits were described, often in outrageously negative lampoons, to defend capitalist values. In other words, the early-eighteenth-century revulsion for the financial market, and the distrust of credit so evident in literary commentaries and on the stage, was replaced by the end of the century by an acceptance in a wide range of writing of the merits of the wealth creation by merchants and of the good of trade, so long as it followed civilized parameters.

The final question pursued by this book is how the broader representation of trade, finance and industry related to the expanding commercial and financial press and jobbing printing that have been the central concern of earlier chapters, but which have so often been neglected.

This study identifies consequential connections between diverse types of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printed and semi-printed materials, and productive relationships between small items such as jobbing forms and documents, and larger publications including newspapers, pamphlets and books that communicated commercial and financial information, guidance and opinion. Also at issue is the connection between the matter carried by print and how print conveyed it, the most important products of that connection being knowledge, accuracy, efficiency, security, authority and the creation of trust. In the 120 years between 1680 and 1800, stationers, printers, engravers and booksellers contributed to a multiplication of material publications that enhanced economic confidence and engineered beneficial (as well as some disadvantageous) conformities of practice and principle.

In 1726, the French visitor de Saussure observed that ‘you often see an Englishman taking a treaty of peace more to heart than he does his own affairs’. Sixty years later, a greatly matured and more sophisticated press presented various reports in anticipation of the Versailles Treaty of 21 November 1787. At the beginning of that month, the World and Fashionable Advertiser recounted that ‘a prodigious number of new faces, male and female, were seen at the Bank yesterday, investing their property, in consequence of the Peace appearance; and the Three per Cent, Consols, felt the influence of returning Confidence’. This followed, said the article, misreporting and a volatility in trading and fortune. Now, ‘it is expected that to-morrow and Tuesday next will witness the greatest rise when the Stocks will increase before Christmas, and most probably will ascertain the standard price of the Funds; so that those who are fortunate enough to get in this day, will receive the best interest for their money’. This report from the World and Fashionable Advertiser then listed ‘the reasons which lead us to this opinion’ (and the editorial ploy of the ‘us’ was significant).

Printers and stationers proved potent if fitful agents in religious and political change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe but, during the eighteenth century, print exerted new influence in subtle and far-reaching ways. The impact of the printing press in finance and commerce was manifest in England and in the British Isles whose economies advanced so extensively from the late seventeenth century. Printers promoted and serviced unprecedented financial and commercial expansion. The scale of press activity was also exceptional. In England, book, pamphlet and newspaper production soared, but in the years between the lapse of the licensing laws in 1695 and the first successful mechanized printing of a newspaper in 1814, the volume, quality and location of small-item or ‘jobbing’ printing was transformed. Nothing as potent had been seen since the arrival of the printing press in London in the late fifteenth century. What was even more remarkable was that printing-house business accelerated despite a virtual technological standstill in the design of the common printing press. The printed output of the 120 years after 1695 was the crowning achievement of the manual press before its replacement by mechanical power. Intaglio engraving and etching processes greatly advanced. Engravers were busier than ever, with striking technical improvements to design and illustration. For the merchant, retailer, manufacturer and investor, the changing products of the printing house were nothing short of revolutionary.

Increasingly during the eighteenth century, print recorded trading achievement and debated its consequences. Writers, illustrators and compilers all became more certain of their audience and of the practicality and effectiveness of their instruction. Printed books introduced and popularized commercial techniques. Printers and stationers enabled and refined trading practice by means of paper ledgers and account books and a vast array of printed materials that ranged from simple documents, certificates and ‘blank’ forms, to sophisticated manuals and commentaries. Bound and ruled blank books revolutionized record keeping and the precision and authority of the balance sheet. Print, chronicling, evaluating and instructing, helped effect a business revolution.

This book updates and revises my first examination of the productive relationship between printing and the publication of financial and commercial news and information.

‘Publishing’ is a very broad activity. It is the making public, to a lesser or greater extent, of material items that are scribal, printed or a mixture of both, and textual or pictorial or a mixture of both. Publishing is the dissemination of materials that are books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, single sheets, or a great range of small printed items such as forms and advertisements, or an indeterminate amalgam or blend of these formats. As the commercial market for books and print developed in early modern and eighteenth-century England, so did the different profiles of demand, distribution and financial mediation. The resulting precautionary and punitive regulation by Church and state was much abetted by the property interests of leading booksellers, printers and stationers. The book trade advanced as a trade in argument, in knowledge, in belief, in instruction and in entertainment. The trade brought for its promoters and craftsmen fortunes as well as financial and personal disaster, and jobbing printing (that is the printing of small items other than books) supported the business of the printer more than any other type of custom.

From the late seventeenth century in particular, the volume, quality and location of printing, publication and jobbing printing in England was transformed. The scale of press activity was unprecedented. Nothing as potent had been seen since the arrival of the printing press across Europe in the mid to late fifteenth century. What was even more remarkable was that printing-house business accelerated despite a virtual technological standstill in the design of the common printing press.

Unsurprisingly, early modern book publishing in Britain was dominated by publishing in England, and book publishing in England dominated in turn by publishing in London. Yet even London book production and marketing appeared, in relative terms, to be limited before the eighteenth century, and although the endeavours of printers in provincial cities and market towns throughout the three kingdoms were crucial, they have been lost to historical view. Many of the productions were ephemeral and no longer survive, although numerous records attest to the commission, manufacture and consumption of their products, and most particularly in the country towns as well as in the financial centre of London.

Literary historians and sociologists have spoken of the social impact of print as a form of restructuring consciousness. Historical reconstructions of attitudinal change have been greatly assisted by broad questions about the penetration of literature in society through studies of production, retail, borrowing and circulation, about the use to which books were put, and about the objective of writers and the confidence placed in their message.1 The broader question of ‘printedness’ raised issues, as also addressed by earlier chapters here, particularly in relation to jobbing printing and the production of small printed items. The history of publishing that informed and assisted business does benefit, however, from revisiting the more traditional focus of the ‘book’. The widening of the type and volume of publication and the extension of distribution networks have already been seen in relation to the servicing of the business community. Print replicated and circulated business news, standardized teaching and supported proposition and protest. In the full community, one effect of literature was to establish tacit rules affecting the direction of subsequent writing. Contributors were urged to consider the improvement of society and search for both explanatory and predictive laws.

By the end of the century, more Britons than ever before had been able to read about the characteristics of commerce and industry. The expansion of both print and trade intensified debate over the origins and consequences of financial and commercial transactions. Professional disputants, from Grub Street hacks to scholarly writers on ethics and political arithmetic, were occupied by questions concerning the intended or unintended consequences of what is now loosely called ‘economics’. Country gentlemen, clerics and amateur followers of commerce took to publishing tracts about trade for themselves. Even the general use of language was transformed. Increasing familiarity with economic acts brought a semantic narrowing of such words as ‘fortune’, ‘corruption’ and ‘interest’. The words ‘tradesman’ and ‘manufacturer’ assumed completely new interpretations.

The history of popular inquiry into such topics as trade, finance and population, and the actual dynamic of print in the transmission of economic theories and histories in the eighteenth century, still requires more research, despite the vast literature that engages with the intellectual origins of political economy and political arithmetic.

The business strategies of the printers reflected their locality as well as the strength of their client and market relationships. Long-term contracts and sustained demand for a specific publication were relatively rare. Flexibility and diversity of operation was usually the basis of survival. This was especially so given the underdevelopment of regional and local markets where the products of the printing house and the skills of the printer were adapted to an increasingly wide and experimental range of business needs.

Recovering the business profile of the eighteenth-century printer’s office is problematic. Much of the actual servicing of commerce by print has left fragmentary evidence and the diversity of the printers’ operations only adds to the confusion. Many sources seem unpromising. Original constituent contracts of the ‘financial revolution’ do survive, but usually they have featured only incidentally, if at all, in surveys of the development of joint-stock companies or government revenue operations. The history of overseas and inland trade has been constructed from diverse sources, but surviving printed chits of exchange are rarely considered in terms of their origination, design and use. Accounts of local retailing are even patchier, reliant upon the survival of shop accounts and trading advertisements.

Business historians have faced similar difficulties with the unevenness of eighteenth-century commercial and industrial records. Few examples survive of the many printed items that were ordered by businesses, revenue-raising bodies, or financial companies and it is often impossible to gauge their representativeness. The fragments of such jobbing printing are also treated very differently according to the wide variety of archives in which they reside. In many business and family archives, many such items remain uncatalogued, to be found simply by accident in boxes and files of named papers and letters. At the other extreme, some filled-in printed blanks, including receipt slips, promissory notes and cargo dockets, are individually catalogued components of cherished institutional collections.

The removal of these slender items from their original working business archive, however, only heightens their isolation and the difficulty in interpreting their original use and significance. Evidence of orders sent to printers and corresponding evidence of production compensate for some of the archival and interpretational complications of surviving printed and part-printed jobbing items.

Eighteenth-century London acted as a principal clearing centre for financial and commercial agreements, and for the development of public and private investment in bonds and stocks and in insurance against risk and disaster. In the provinces there followed a gradual enlargement of the money market and of credit and insurance services, but London (and for particular services and printing, particular parts of London) continued to be the hub of affairs.

Without the work of the metropolitan printer it is impossible to explain the success of the financial experiments of the 1690s: the stock-jobbing explosion of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the fledgling structure of public credit, confidence in currency transactions, new mercantile and retailing initiatives or even late-eighteenth-century country banking. The sheer weight of paper was dazzling. During the century, many hundreds of printer-stationers were employed in providing the bonds, notes of authorization and redemption, company proposals, certificates, vouchers, policy forms, indentures and other business blanks ordered by both London and country customers. The surviving ledgers of William Strahan, probably the richest printer of the century, reveal not only his printing of editions of Pope or of the Vicar of Wakefield, but also major contracts for expensive jobbing work.

From the final quarter of the seventeenth century, the potential for print applications was already obvious to major mercantile houses. Powerful merchants like William Braund or Samuel Eyre clearly appreciated the security and authority offered by overseas trading bills of exchange and part-printed blanks for description, lading and receipt. The market for merchants’ bills for investment depended upon the safeguards offered by letterpress forms against fraud and misrepresentation. Blanks were produced for a variety of bills of exchange, but also for routine bills drawn by merchants on their overseas correspondents and agents, and for monthly accommodation bills in the bullion trade or special cargoes. The products of London’s presses not only quickened exchange procedures, but also meant that the capital was already challenging Amsterdam as a new exchange centre and bill market by the 1720s. By the 1730s, large operators like Samuel Brooks, Abraham Coleman and Joseph Watkins both generated and depended upon a great bulk of blanks and printed bills.

The commercial practices and customer services associated with a developing ‘consumer mentality’ are now standard features of economic histories of eighteenth-century England. Much of this almost wholly domestic consumer activity, whether emulative buying or the entrepreneurial stimulation of demand, would have been impossible without the extension of jobbing printing after 1700. From the first decades of the century, the increase in the number of printing houses and improvements in engraving, letterpress typography and paper-making served merchants, manufacturers and retailers. Less obvious activities of the local printer also encouraged market development. The distributional services of the pressman and stationer were used by many different trades. The printing house became a convenient accommodation address and a centre for the co-ordination of projects and lobbying related to the extension of local business.

The clearest contribution made by print to the promotion of local commerce, however, was in advertising. Advertisements have been studied from a variety of perspectives, and the historical relationship between advertising and the creation of a local mart for goods and services has been the subject of renewed investigation. Much greater understanding of eighteenth-century advertising in England is now possible, especially given advances in newspaper history. Several focused studies of the role of advertising in the eighteenth century have also provoked fierce debate about whether saturation advertising and other related techniques are a sign of weakness or strength. Connections between bibliographical and printing history and the advance of advertising have been meagre, however. Although printed advertising dates from the first century of moveable type, it was not until the late seventeenth century that the printing of bills and advertisements became a common business practice. Merchants commissioned printed pieces for negotiating and monitoring transactions and for informing agents of wares for sale. Even in London, however, there is little evidence to suggest that many general tradesmen and storekeepers adopted regular printed advertisements much before 1700. At that date, the actual term ‘advertisement’ had been in common currency for a few decades only. Earlier advertising was sufficiently small in scale to make the new initiatives of the London and regional printers appear both bold and innovatory.