Political and Financial Networks

The management of finance became an important political tool during the period that Newton was at the Mint. Westminster, Whitehall, and the City of London were linked by complicated networks of association or allegiance, and those who could effectively exploit these connections could obtain power and great profits. The exchange of favours had long been a part of government business in the early modern period but became increasingly criticized in both press and Parliament during the eighteenth century partly due to the sheer amount of money now changing hands. This is because Britain’s expanding colonial empire was underwritten by new forms of insurance, investment, and speculation. Complex international networks of debts and credits were developed through the practice of placing monetary values on risk, loss, and even human lives, and these connections were highly prized. This is why Tories and Whigs alike fought to establish national banks run on their own economic principles: the Tories had their various Land Bank schemes, but the Whigs were ultimately triumphant in founding the Bank of England in 1694.

Nowhere is the link between power, profit, and politics more apparent than in the British practice of turning enslaved Africans into tradeable capital. Many members of Parliament were involved in slavery and other forms of exploitative colonial trade. Powerful merchants similarly advanced their material interests through politics, benefiting from reformed state institutions such as the Board of Trade and a Parliament increasingly concerned with the pursuit of profit. From 1690 to 1714, for example, members of Parliament debated whether the British slave trade should be best pursued through a joint-stock company or through a free market, eventually passing the Trade with Africa Act 1697. This allowed all English merchants to trade, providing they paid a ten per cent levy to the Company on goods exported from Africa. The number of slaves transported on English ships increased dramatically. From 1668 to 1722, the Royal African Company supplied the English Mint with gold gathered from the Gambia River gold fields. Coins made with such gold were designed with an elephant below the bust of the king or queen and gave it the name of ‘the guinea.’

Complex political loyalties and financial networks shaped such developments. The Whig banker, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, led the cause for free trade, while the Tory MP and economist, Charles Davenant, was a supporter of the Jacobite, monopolistic Royal African Company. When Robert Harley ascended to the position of Lord High Treasurer (Queen Anne’s chief minister) in 1711, he also supported the Company, though he eventually chose to establish a new joint-stock company, the South Sea Company, to honour the Assiento contract with Spain instead. The decline of the Royal African Company led to the expansion of the sugar and tobacco industries, which the British government taxed heavily, channeling these profits into the Treasury.

The highly political nature of finance can also be seen in the bidding war of the East India Company. When the Whigs gained power in 1695, a powerful lobby of tradesmen and former associates forced Parliament to open up trade in India to any English firm, breaking the (Tory-led) trading monopoly that existed since the Company’s foundation in 1599. A rival syndicate supported by Charles Montagu, the Lord Treasurer and Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered a loan to the government to help finance the Nine Years War, and became the ‘New’ East India Company.

Newton was persuaded by Montagu to stand for Parliament for Cambridge in 1701. He was successful but many other Whigs lost their seats, and the ‘Old’ East India Company got several of its own MPs into the Commons. Newton’s defeated rival, Anthony Hammond, composed a pamphlet entitled Considerations Upon Corrupt Elections of Members to Serve in Parliament. Though it contained no explicit reference to Cambridge, it did argue that the New East India Company was engaged in an extensive programme of electoral corruption to insure a government policy favourable to its interests. Both Newton and the public at large could easily have read Hammond’s pamphlet (and others like it) as a charge that he was a paid lackey to the Whigs. This was perhaps exacerbated by his knighting by Queen Anne in 1705.

British society was changing. An expanding business classes were focused on the creation of wealth: they bought and sold estates, government contracts and parliamentary seats, developing experimental manufacturing, trading, and planting projects, capitalizing on public improvements, and making fortunes in slavery and stocks. In this context, then, financial favours and political interest had a newly dangerous disruptive power.