A Study on the Finance of London during the Restoration Period

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Despite of heightened interest in the history of early modern London, financial problem of this rapidly growing capital has been rather neglected by the historians. This study intends to clarify one aspect of the complicate process of urbanization of early modern London, focusing on the finance of the corporation of London. This study has two purposes. One is to search the original manuscript materials concerning London's finance mainly deposited in the Records Office of the Corporation of London and make date base of them. Two examples of the chamberlain's accounts, City's Cash for 1643/4 and Cash Book for 1669/70 were almost completely transcripted and data-based. This data base is to open to researchers through the author's home page. Another purpose is to analyze and interpret the vicissitude of London's finance in the long run, especially from the Civil War to the Restoration periods. The amount of money the City's chamber dealt with swelled up to enormous size from the latter half of the Elizabethan to the Early Stuart periods. This great swelling of finance proceeded parallel to the unprecedented economic and demographic, and spatial, expansion of the capital and was partly due to the increased cost this rapid urbanization charged on the corporation. The more realistic factor that interpret the cause of the swelling of London's finance, however, was the intensification of the relation of London and the crown. Although the London's finance seemed to improve in the late fifties, it was getting worse again after the Restoration. The Great Fire hit hard the financial ability of London Chamber, but that was not fatal damage at all, because the financial deterioration of London resulted, in its essence, from the incompatibility of the corporation of London as a medieval citizen's community with the nascent modern capital.