ABSTRACT
The role of Britain in the drift to the gold standard seems at first sight straightforward. Apart from Portugal, effectively a client state of Britain by the eighteenth century, Britain was the only country formally on a gold standard in the mid-nineteenth century. For most of the century, a strong consensus in Britain supported the gold standard, with the notable exception of men such as Thomas Attwood, leader of the Birmingham School, 'who had no blind faith in a metallic standard of the Ricardian kind'. Ironically the most sustained intellectual and political challenge to the gold standard in Britain came at the very threshold of its emergence as a workable international system of exchange. But crucially, whereas the new gold finds only served to confirm Britain's attachment to the gold standard, they did lead directly to other countries moving on to silver.
