We find it plausible that Morgan’s recurring ability to include subject matter experts in routine syndicates could have been applied to the task of coordinating lender of last resort facilities. This provides at least one plausible explanation for how he developed the skills to act as lender of last resort in the American setting that did not include a central bank.

This chapter moves from examining institutional changes to the cultural history of morals and emotions, by examining how the evolution of the idea of the self came to supplant the institutional mediation of local law courts. It traces how three concepts – self-love, happiness, and interest – were developed and disseminated as religious and interpersonal ethics, all related to the development of the self within the singular mind. This was a crucial move that allowed the idea and practice of savings to move from taking the form of a debt owed, to the interest-bearing capital described above. It also validated the crucial concept of interest within religion, and this was related to the increasing moral acceptance of the interest rate. Although a legal interest rate had existed from the Elizabethan Act of 1571, interest rates are difficult to find mentioned explicitly in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth, however, they had become commonplace.

Morgan’s legacy was twofold: his development of processes for handling crises and his recruitment of people during crises who would live on long after he died to influence the practice of last resort lending specifically and central banking more generally.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of how historians have used the concept of capitalism. It argues that the financial history of capital needs to be integrated more fully into the histories of all social relations if we want to use history to refine a ‘presentist’ concept about financial power and its effect on society and political choice. It is a contention of what has been termed the ‘new history of capitalism’ that financial history is often too narrowly institutional in that it focuses to narrowly on economic growth and not the social effects of financialisation on broader society. Finance, in these histories, when socialised, is generally presented as having a negative role on broader social relations. However, capital was created institutionally through relations of interdependence first, and then once created was used by those who accumulated great amounts of it to become more powerful.

In the seventeenth century the Renaissance and Reformation inspired worldly ambitions and self-fashioning among Europeans. New opportunities, such as commercialization and exploration, along with new pressures such as mounting poverty and vagrancy in England, threatened communities and traditions. English adventurers sought their fortunes in Virginia and New England, but their loyalties to traditional duties to God and community varied widely. The lives, worries, and circumstances of Captain John Smith, explorer and self-promoter, and Robert Keayne, a prosperous Boston merchant, illustrate emerging ways of thinking about self-made fates among these colonists. Both pursued their worldly ambitions through incessant work, and they participated in an early stage of shaping the criteria by which Americans would judge successes and failures. They also expressed strong beliefs about fostering communities and working for them while they pursued their own ambitions. At the same time, and like their peers, they guarded the boundaries of inclusion in those communities, defining narrowly who could belong, who merited respect, and whose exploitation and destruction they felt was justified.

Morgan became adept at learning how to corral the numerous small pools of bank reserves dispersed across the US in banks, the Treasury, and abroad. To help us understand his journey, this chapter serves as a user’s guide to the banking and financial institutions and legislated structures that confronted J. P. Morgan. It provides a reference for subsequent chapters.

Adam Smith’s political economy of what we might call emotional capital formation is a natural ending point for this book. It sums up how the pamphlet debate arguing for economic growth caused by currency creation that began in the seventeenth century eventually achieved fruition. In the 1650s, authors like Samuel Hartlib or William Potter saw a country in which increased population growth had led to unemployment and increasing poverty. Their proposed solution was to increase employment in industry by first increasing agricultural production and then using the increase to employ extra bodies in industrial production. But they realised that this could not be done within the confines of the informal oral credit system that had developed in England up until that time. Too often employers were unable to find enough currency to pay workers outside of agriculture, where they could be paid in kind. As a result, the poor had to purchase goods on credit, often at higher prices because they were not trusted, while periods of unemployment could lead to them not being able to purchase enough to keep themselves properly fed. Thus, it was proposed that some form of paper currency was needed to overcome this problem by essentially increasing liquidity.

This chapter outlines the history of previous institutions that created forms of capital in Europe, including land, dowries, banks, bills of exchange, and government debt. It examines the reasons why the system of informal oral credit, as it had developed over the previous 100-odd years, began to be criticised during the Commonwealth period. Many authors started to claim that it was both inefficient and an obstacle to economic growth. Many pamphlets were published containing proposals of different sorts of banks, which would issue paper currency to speed up circulation. Some of these were based on previous European examples. The nature of these proposals is examined, together with a summary of how they related to the creation of the Bank of England. Its establishment is normally seen as the successful outcome of this debate, but in fact it was not primarily created as an institution to expand the supply of credit, but to help fund the government debt. The increasing cost of the War of Spanish Succession did, however, result in the issue of things like Exchequer or Treasury bills, as well as South Sea and Bank stock to fund the war. The last part of the chapter focuses on the significant effect these multiple forms of paper currency had on liquidity within London.

The myth of self-made success triumphed in the new millennium, incentivizing claims that are impervious to reality. Prominent examples include George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Kylie Jenner, who began their lives in great financial and social wealth, yet they all believe they were self-made. Bush and Trump endorsed policies that lowered taxes for elites but cut programs that served everyone else, arguing that taxes punish success and social support programs foster irresponsibility. The myth eased reducing constraints on financial exploits, making possible both great fortunes and economic crises, such as the Great Recession that began in 2007 and led to taxpayers’ bailouts of private institutions. The megahit reality TV show Shark Tank displayed the myth on steroids, starring “self-made” entrepreneurs. In contrast, the despair of struggling people accused of self-made failure and willful irresponsibility has been deadly. Such accusations can be profitable, as J.D. Vance’s career has shown. This myth-made culture ignores the communities and institutions that make wealth generation possible. It frees tycoons to acquire and donate large fortunes, garnering acclaim as philanthropists.

The commonality among these three interventions centered on Morgan’s ability to harness financial capacity to smooth over disturbances that did not threaten the entire financial system.

This chapter examines how the local issue of notes, wage payments, and the brokerage of bills of exchange over longer distances came together in the form of county banks after 1760. Certain tradesmen and industrialists moved from financing their own businesses to providing finance on a more exclusive basis to their communities in the form of institutions they then decided to call banks. This chapter will show how trust in individual local brokers was gradually transformed into institutions that their owners termed banks, and how they became a part of local society. They emerged out of local practice, and did not generally copy London institutions such as Child’s or Hoare’s banks. It will also examine just how important the payment of industrial wage labour was in the formation of county banking. The chapter will end by placing Adam Smith’s advocacy of banking and his discussion of capital in the context of the developments described in this book. It was Smith’s contention that the value of labour converted into abstract capital was the wealth of a nation. His was a ‘capitalism’ based on the ethics needed to create the conditions to make capital keep its value.