Newton and the Mint Project

Having received funding from Winton Capital for three years, the project seeks to create a comprehensive online digital edition of the administrative papers of Sir Isaac Newton. This will form a separate part of the umbrella Newton Project. It will consist of an accurate, Open Access rendition of all (c. 2 million words) of Newton’s surviving Mint writings. These include:

his records of information relating to counterfeiters
his assessment of the proper relative value of gold and silver
his designs for coins and medals
his own analysis of the fineness of gold and silver
his day-to-day management of the various activities at the Mint

Through the study of Newton’s career at the Mint, we will shed a light on the workings of the Mint during his tenure (1696-1727). But we are also extending the analysis to cover a period from the early 1670s to the middle of the 1760s.

The resource will have general introductions and will contain a series of contextual notes and commentaries, along with detailed financial information from both printed books and unexamined documents at The National Archives.

We will also use digital tools for accessing and analysing the data relating to Newton’s financial work and his prosecution of counterfeiters.

Elements of the Project

The project is structured around six elements

Transcription of all of the depositions and statements that Newton drew up over more than a decade of hunting, turning and prosecuting counterfeiters. Using the information in these depositions alongside digital technology we aim to create different routes for people to explore how Newton built up his web of informers and made use of it to exercise surveillance over suspects. One of these routes will be the use of GIS tools to plot the locations of informers and counterfeiters on a digital version of Rocque’s 1746 map of London.

Examination of the general organisational and managerial activities in which Newton was engaged. He spent much of his first months at the Mint studying its history and its workings, and invested a great deal of time analysing the skills and working practices of the men who actually produced the coins. According to contemporaries, Newton was paramount in re-organising the Mint operations, improving its efficiency so that it could deliver the immense gains in productivity that were witnessed in the later 1690s. The fruits of his labours were the reorganisation of the core business of the Mint during the Great Recoinage of 1696-9, the amalgamation of the English and Scottish Mints in preparation for the Act of Union in 1707, and the management of the Mint’s operations during the major political upheavals of 1709-10 and 1713-15.

Analysis of the work that Newton did on the basis of his extensive knowledge of chemistry in order to ensure that the silver and gold produced under his care in the Tower of London was of the correct quality. Every few years there was a ‘trial of the pyx’, a semi-public test of gold coins that compared a randomly selected sample of coins produced by the Mint workers with a ‘test’ coin. We will also look at Newton’s suggestions for the improvement of the ultra-secret minting technology at the Tower of London.

Examination of the underlying assumptions behind Newton’s economic theory, including the question of how much his mathematical expertise was involved in his work, and we will assess how his economic, political and even religious views affected the recommendations he made regarding the relative value of silver and gold, and the degree of silver content within silver coins. Newton was a senior government bureaucrat during some of the most significant and turbulent decades in the history of England and Britain, and his papers also shed light on the workings of government during this key period. We will put Newton’s work in its contexts by making available a number of contemporary writings by political and economic contemporaries, most notably those of Dudley North, William Lowndes, Bernard de Mandeville, and John Locke. In an era when Joint-stock companies were created and new forms of assessing the risks and benefits of financial trading were devised, we will also analyse and transcribe much of the content of the contemporary records of stock and bullion prices that are contained in printed records and in over 200 volumes of economic data from the period at the National Archives

Use the papers to focus on the functions of the Mint in the English and British economies during Newton’s tenure, and particularly on its key role in what was already a global financial world. We will explore the many contexts of production of silver and gold in this period, notably in what is now Peru and what until recently was the Gold Coast in Africa. We will also examine the ultimate fate of the silver and gold bullion that passed through Newton’s hands, most of which went via goldsmithing and East India Company channels to India and China. Although the focus of the work will be on the years 1690-1727, we seek to go beyond the termini of Newton’s presence at the institution to cover the situation at the Mint from the great Stop of the Exchequer in 1672 to the financial crisis that led the Seven Years’ War in 1756.