Banks, Paper Currency and the Fiscal State: Th e Case of Ireland, Stated, 1660–1783

In recent years it has been argued that late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Ireland saw the replication of aspects of the British fiscal state paradigm.2 A key component for sustaining such an argument was the fact that Ireland was ‘a selffunding garrison for a significant portion of the British standing army’.3 Those funds came from older hereditary crown income, post-1692 parliamentary taxation and, from 1716 onwards, a national debt.