ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the governance scheme of trusts, which creates personified groups—the modern state and business corporations—and makes them debtors, contributed to the evolution of modern bank money into de facto currency in early modern England. It examines why the concept of legal personae and trusts is critical to our understanding of modern money. Credit economies that existed before capitalism created institutions to protect debtors or often revived the social order by canceling consumer debts. By contrast, the capitalist credit economy considers strict debt obligations to be a supreme moral good and a way of maintaining the social order. It creates a political scheme to ensure that debt obligations are strictly fulfilled. This scheme is a trust. The trust turns the debts of individuals, whose death can cancel their debt obligations, into the debts of imaginary groups, such as the modern state, whose identities and obligations are permanently maintained by replaceable trustees. The section further argues that without this politics of the trust, modern banking could not have developed.
