My name is David M. Batt and I am a PhD student in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. My research concerns the the history and philosophy of economics and in particular the emergence of paper money and credit theories of money in Western Europe in the Early Modern period. In all that I do, I am influenced by the tradition of French historical epistemology in particular the works of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Arnold I. Davidson, and Lorraine Daston.

I started out studying the physical sciences in my undergraduate degree because I had always been fascinated by understanding the nature of physical reality. Astronomy and mathematics were my two favourite subjects because (1) the object of astronomical knowledge had always seemed to me so distant and foreign from those of us who tried to comprehend it, a vast sky of mute impenetrability working away despite of everything; and (2) the formalism and language of mathematics spoke to me of ideas that seemed to me beautiful, lingering on the edge of thought, shimmering in their physical and empirical impossibility.

I quickly realised, however, towards the end of my Masters in mathematical physics, that what I really enjoyed about studying the sciences was not so much the potential of doing original research of my own, contributing to the slow accumulation of knowledge on the edge of an unfolding field of inquiry, but rather, what I enjoyed was spending time trying to understand the theories and concepts of the people of past ages, people who had lived many hundreds of years ago whose ideas still occupied a place in the sanctioned thought of the present. What I had discovered was that I could take science as a historical object, constituted by the past it had once had, a reflection not of the way we think now but of how it was once thought differently.

I chose to complete my graduate thesis in an area of history that had received little attention from historians and philosophers of science: the history of money. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s discussion of the “sciences of wealth” in The Order of Things, as well as Mary Poovey’s elaboration of the history of economics in A History of the Modern Fact, what interested me was trying to understand the development and emergence of a certain kind of knowledge relating to money; not the manifestation of a culture’s desires, the mentalities predisposing them to spend, accumulate, and produce, secondary to the noble and objective sciences of nature, but a knowledge of money conceived as an epistemic object in its own right, simultaneously integrated within broader transformations of knowledge and science contemporaneous with it—a knowledge of money studied from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science. What came to fascinate me over the course of my research, was how the emergence and widespread adoption of paper money in eighteenth-century Europe had been conceptualised by thinkers at the time and how its emergence corresponded with both new technical modes of production and the recognition of new objects of knowledge.

In the course of my studies I have come to believe, along with a number of other scholars such as Margaret Schabas, Mary Morgan, Carl Wennerlind, and Philip Mirowski that both the disciplines of History of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science would come to benefit from a much closer interaction. I believe, for example, that the recent emphasis that some scholars in the History and Philosophy of Science have placed on knowledge as a form of practice or mode of inquiry that seeks to intervene in the world, shaping it and understanding it at the same time, could benefit greatly from the large amount of the historical work that has recently been done regarding the history of money.

Many economists, historians, and sociologists have placed a great importance on the role that the state plays in the construction, development, and management of money. This can be seen most clearly, for example, in the works of Alfred Mitchell Innes, J. M. Keynes, Paul Grierson, Geoffrey Ingham, L. Randall Wray, and Christine Desan. Specifically, it is the role played by the state over the management and design of two important elements of a monetary system which are identified as uniquely implying a “sovereign, currency issuing government”: (1) the ability to define an abstract unit of account within which all debts and credits are denominated; and (2) the ability to identify a means of payment for the purposes of discharging such debts or making use of such credits. The practice of making money along with the material and technological infrastructure which underlies it, is seen as a governance project, an element of the body of knowledge practices associated with acts of governing, managing, and administering both the domestic and foreign affairs of a state, a form of knowledge unique to sovereign governing bodies and radically distinct—although not completely separate—from the kinds of practice available to individual or corporate bodies.

The emphasis here on the modes of inquiry relevant to a sovereign state is important, I believe, because it emphasises a knowledge tradition which is older than the modern discipline of economics. The older tradition, which the economist Erik S. Reinert has called the “the other cannon”, was concerned not only with the strong protectionist policies of nascent capitalism but with the monetary and fiscal affairs of a sovereign state; it emphasised, for example, the ways in which sovereign governments could both acquire money and regulate its supply within the domestic sphere. The practices of making money were therefore central to the economic concerns of state in early-modern Europe. In this sense, the management of money within the practices of early-modern statecraft were not just concerned with how sovereign governments raised or earned money either through the taxation of goods or by borrowing funds, but were concerned with the actions of sovereigns as the makers of money, both as a unit of account and a means of payment. I am fascinated with how existing history and philosophy of science can be made to better understand these disciplines which have mostly been excluded from the history of science because of their apparent opposition to the natural sciences.

Specifically, I would like to look at the introduction of paper money and the development of credit theories of money in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth century along side the founding of the Bank of England and what has come to be known as the Financial Revolution. Paper money’s genesis was not just a supplementary form of money introduced on top of a pre-existing commodity coin, but a completely novel way of conceiving of state financing and public payment. Many alternative proposals seeking the introduction of credit based means of payment were similarly suggested at the time in England to remedy a shortage of metallic coin. These proposals were discussed, debated, and variously attempted, all throughout the seventeenth century in England.

After pursuing these themes in a PhD I hope to continue working on the history of economics in an academic researching and teaching role, specifically looking at the history of money and how it fits into the broader traditions of society, culture, science, and historical epistemology. For the history of money, I believe, is a bridge which links our present understanding of the discipline of economics to many areas of human life and thought which currently do not fit into the narrow conception of what economic science is. I would like to continue to advocate, therefore, for the study of the history of economics within History and Philosophy of Science, working to synthesise the two disciplines and publish research that aims to do that.

If you would like to contact me to ask any questions, suggest any collaborations, or anything really, my contact details can be found on my CV page or my email by clicking "contact" at the bottom of any page.