Taking Money from Strangers: Traders' Responses to Banknotes and the Risks of Forgery in Late Georgian London
Taking Money from Strangers: Traders' Responses to Banknotes and the Risks of Forgery in Late Georgian London
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从陌生人那里拿钱：乔治亚时代晚期伦敦交易员对纸币和伪造风险的反应
DOI：
10.1017/jbr.2021.55
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发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Barker H
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Barker H
在乔治王时代晚期的英国，向陌生人销售商品是零售商的一个重大职业风险，这是难以避免的。在较大的城镇和城市，危险尤其大，店主们依赖于由大量他们不认识的顾客组成的稳定的贸易流。虽然商人接受伪钞可能会造成经济损失，甚至可能被起诉，但拒绝接受伪钞意味着失去重要的客户。在城市人口不断增长的地区，商人和妇女在日常业务中面临着越来越棘手的困境，因为他们与更多的陌生人打交道，这些陌生人的可信度和个人信用非常难以衡量，而当时伪造钞票的情况正在上升。零售商对钞票和付款人的选择，说明了18世纪末19世纪初城市社会中日益增长的匿名性，城镇居民寻求驾驭这种匿名性的一些方式。这篇文章表明，交易者依赖于一系列在以前的经验中通常有效的技术：检查钞票和那些小心翼翼地出示钞票的陌生人，依靠邻居和家庭成员的专业知识，并优先与那些似乎与当地社区有联系的人打交道。这些行为表明，“现代性”可能以意想不到和矛盾的方式影响了普通伦敦人的生活和观点，其中一些与旧的社会形式密切相关。
Selling to strangers was a significant occupational hazard for retailers in late Georgian Britain, one that was hard to avoid. The dangers were especially great in larger towns and cities, where shopkeepers were dependent on a steady stream of passing trade composed of a large number of customers that they did not know. Though traders risked financial loss and even possible prosecution by accepting counterfeit banknotes, refusal to accept them meant losing vital custom. In areas of growing urban populations, tradesmen and women thus faced an increasingly tricky dilemma in their day-to-day business as they dealt with more strangers whose trustworthiness and personal credit were extremely hard to gauge, at a time when banknote forgery was on the rise. The decisions that retailers made about both banknotes and the individuals who presented them for payment illustrate some of the ways that town dwellers sought to navigate the rising anonymity of urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article suggests that traders relied on a series of techniques that in previous experience usually worked: examining banknotes and those strangers who presented them with care, relying on the expertise of neighbors and members of their household, and dealing by preference with individuals who appeared to be linked to their local community. These behaviors demonstrate that “modernity” might have affected the lives and outlooks of ordinary Londoners in unexpected and contradictory ways, some strongly linked to older forms of society.