The History of Financial Advice

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'The History of Financial Advice' provides the first thorough study of a genre of writing that has amassed a huge readership, and had major social and economic effects, but which has remained largely neglected by cultural and economic historians and by literary critics. As Lendol Calder writes in the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (2012), 'the print culture that helped people make sense of money through financial advice', still 'awaits its historian', despite the fact that 'concerns about money - how to get it, how to save it, how to invest, multiply and spend it - have likely sold more books in the last two hundred years than any other subject after religion'.The project charts the history of personal financial advice literature as it has developed in Britain and the United States, ranging from the private letters and domestic advice manuals of the eighteenth century to the emergence of financial journalism and investment advice in the nineteenth century to the proliferation of popular financial novels, lifestyle guides and blogs in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on approaches to the study of rhetoric and narrative central to literary and cultural studies, the project investigates how works of financial advice have succeeded in appealing to the desires and fantasies of their readers, despite a lack of evidence for the efficacy of the investment strategies such works propound. Making use of the strand of social science known as 'Cultural Economy', the project also considers how financial advice has shaped public perceptions of, and activities in, financial markets, such that the genre has actively made and remade the very markets about which it advises.The project team will make a major contribution to the scholarship on popular interactions with finance by researching and writing the first comprehensive study of the history of financial advice in Britain and the United States, beginning in the Financial Revolution of the early eighteenth century and moving through to the present. Members of the team will share this research with fellow researchers at prominent international conferences in the fields of cultural, economic and business history. The project team will also build on established relationships with representatives of the financial services industry, as well as financial regulators, educators, charities and policy makers, to share ideas in workshops, provide training sessions and collaborate in the development of initiatives in financial literacy, regulatory policy and professional practice. As part of the project, the team will collect, catalogue and annotate an archive of financial advice literature. Acquisition of the archive will be funded by the UK's first dedicated library of financial writing, run by Didasko the financial education charity, which will also provide a permanent home for the collection, where it will be available for consultation by students, academics, industry trainees and the general public, aided by a purpose-written guide produced by the project team. The key findings of the research will also be made readily and widely accessible to the public through the production of a short film to the made available online, with the working title 'What Three Centuries of Financial Advice Can Teach You'.'The History of Financial Advice' will both mark a landmark in scholarship and achieve a major impact on the ways in which financial 'insiders' and 'outsiders' alike think about and participate in markets.