ABSTRACT
Europe’s development gradient ran from west to east and north to south, from educated to illiterate populations, from representative to despotic institutions, from equality to hierarchy. Although after the emancipation of the serfs and the creation of the Bank of Russia in 1860, Russia became a financial partner in European global finance, autocratic state ordained and state controlled banks, and credit facilities with limited reforms remained in place until 1917. As books, pamphlets, essays, written plays, novellas, and novels were made available, and could be read by a broadening public, these flows of information began to influence attitudes toward commerce and money. Literature, like art, was still subject to censorship, litigation, and prison in France and even in England in the years after the South Sea Bubble. The literature of the 1720s to the 1750s is replete with beneficiaries and victims of social mobility from A. R. Lesage’s Turcaret, Marivaux’s Paysan Parvenu, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.
