Abstract
In his staged introduction to Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson brought a scrivener out onto the stage to introduce the play in the form of a legal contract set out in articles of agreement between the audience and the playwright. There it was
covenanted and agreed, by and between [Ben Jonson] above-said, and the said spectators and hearers, as well the curious and envious as favouring and judicious… [who] do for themselves severally covenant and agree, to remain in the places their money or friends have put them in… for the space of two hours and a half and somewhat more. In which time the author promiseth to present them… with a new sufficient play called BarthoVmew Fair.
It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen’orth, his twelve pen’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place; provided always his place get not above his wit.
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Notes
E.S. de Beer (ed.), The Correspondence of John Locke (Oxford, 1976), I, p. 123.
Antony Black has demonstrated that in a European context social contract theory had commercial origins. Antony Black, ‘The juristic origins of social contract theory’, History of Political Thought, XIV. 1 (1993), pp. 57–76.
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Bernard Gert (New York, 1972), pp. 112–13. There has been some discussion as to whether Hobbes himself made the English translation of De Cive, which was published only once in 1651. As Philip Milton has recently pointed out, there are some crucial blunders in the translation concerning the proper legal distinction between a contract and a covenant after Book 11.16 (see below, pp. 323–4) which Hobbes adhered to strictly in the Latin version and in Leviathan. Most of the citations here are taken from the English version which was likely to have been read more widely, but the Latin text has been checked to ensure that Hobbes’ meaning has been accurately conveyed. Philip Milton, ‘Did Hobbes translate De Cive?’, History of Political Thought, XI (1990), pp. 627–38
Ibid., pp. 18, 23, 24, 27, 32–3. The extent to which such notions were prevalent in the seventeenth century is debated by legal historians, But the Leveller comments show that they were also debated by contemporaries. See Morton J. Horowitz, ‘The historical foundations of modern contract law’, Harvard Law Review, 87 (1974), pp. 917–46
A.W.B. Simpson, ‘The Horowitz thesis and the history of contract’, University of Chicago Law Review, 46 (1979), pp. 533–601.
J.D. Alsop, ‘Ethics in the marketplace: Gerrard Winstanley’s London bankruptcy, 1643’, Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), pp. 97–119
R.J. Dalton, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: the experience of fraud 1641’, Historical Journal, 344 (1991), pp. 973–84.
L.S. Presnell, County Banking in the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1956); Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital, a Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 105ff; Iain S. Black, ‘The London agency system in English banking, 1780–1825’, London Journal, 21 (1996), pp. 112–30.
Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood: An eighteenth century entrepreneur in salesmanship and marketing technique’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, XII, 3 (1960), pp. 408–33
Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1987); J. Hoppit, ‘The use and abuse of credit in eighteenth-century England’, in Neil McKendrick and R.B. Outhwaite (eds.), Business Life and Public Policy, Essays in Honor of D.C. Coleman (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 64–78; and J. Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, Historical Journal, 332 (1990), pp. 305–22
R.D. Collinson Black, ‘Jevons, Marshall and the utilitarian tradition’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy 37 (1990), pp. 5–17.
See the essays in Anthony G. Hopwood and Peter Miller, Accounting as Social and Instiutional Practice (Cambridge, 1994); Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (London, 1983), pp. 17–26; and for a discussion of some of these themes in the context of the American and Canadian economies, Peter J. Coleman, Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt, and Bankruptcy, 1607–1900 (Madison, 1974), pp. 257–93; David G. Burley, ‘“Good for all he would ask”: credit and debt in the transition to industrial capitalism — the case of mid-ninteenth century Brantford Ontario’, Histoire sociale — Social History, XX, #39 (1987), pp. 79–99.
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© 1998 Craig Muldrew
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Muldrew, C. (1998). The Contractual Society. In: The Economy of Obligation. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26879-5_11
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