ABSTRACT
During and after the establishment of the Bank of England, a series of pamphlets was published showing the similarities between the English institution and San Giorgio. Some of these pamphlets (discovered in a U.S. library) are very rare and have never been studied. The authors, often anonymous, used Machiavelli’s passage to emphasize the relevance of the Genoese institution, with some authors even translating his entire text into English. The chapter also shows that references to San Giorgio’s model that did not relate to Machiavelli circulated during the lead-up to the founding of the Bank of England. It discusses all these sources in the political context of late seventeenth-century England, showing that the San Giorgio model was considered dangerous, as it provided a path by which a corporation could take over the entire state.
