ABSTRACT
MACAULAY’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND IS COMMONLY THOUGHT OF AS A popular history. Macaulay deliberately targeted a generalized middle-class audience by a language and a style of exposition that had often been admired for their popular and narrative qualities. He made no attempt in this work to advance an elaborate philosophy of history, or to reinvent the conventions of historiography, or to endorse a standard of disciplinary rigor (other than in the amount of research that went into the writing of the book). The work was supposed to achieve its effects primarily through the assumed narrative persuasiveness of English history itself, appealing to its readers as agents in that same narrative of great national prosperity and world domination that it purported to reconstruct. It is equally commonplace to recognize in Macaulay’s work a very important example of a Whig interpretation of history, or more specifically, a Whig interpretation of British constitutional history. History of England presents a national-constitutional narrative in which the accession of William III in 1688 is a historical watershed that represents the political triumph of the Whig cause in a manner that was both a preservation and improvement of the spirit of the English constitution. 1 My goal in this chapter is to discuss a largely ignored element of Macaulay’s constitutional theory-the role of finance capitalism in Macaulay’s understanding of the post-1688 national narrative. In the wake of 1688, suggests Macaulay, there emerges a ‘modern system’ for regulating the relationship between the government and finance capital, and this new arrangement assumes in Macaulay’s history the kind of farreaching importance consistent with his view of modern England as a ‘commercial country.’ Particularly deserving of attention is Macaulay’s account of the origin of national debt (1692) and the incorporation of the Bank of England (1694). These were important events in the juridical regulation of government borrowing, and Macaulay depicted them as constitutive of the
post-1688 constitutional arrangement itself; indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that finance capitalism was in Macaulay’s view the linchpin of the English constitution itself in the country’s transition to the modern age. In these relatively brief passages in Macaulay’s work, the true heroes of modern English history are the institutions of finance capital.
