“Freer and Happier Every Year”: Calculating the Future of Public Credit in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This paper examines one of the first, and most ambitious, attempts to calculate the political future—the Sinking Fund implemented by Robert Walpole, Britain’s first “Prime Minister.” In the wake of the 1720 South Sea Bubble, Walpole and his team of computational advisors formulated the Sinking Fund as a hopeful, mathematically-grounded project for restoring the public’s finances post-crisis. Specifically, the Fund promised to harness the exponential power of compound interest to repay the ominous National Debt. Confronted by the backward-looking “politics of nostalgia” of his “Patriot” opponents, Walpole’s Whig supporters used predictive calculations to claim credit for political successes not yet achieved. (Most spectacularly: in 1728, one anonymous pamphleteer, impersonating a historian writing three-hundred years later (in 2028), reflected back on how under Walpole Britain had grown “freer and happier every Year by the Sinking Fund.”) Intellectual historians like J. G. A. Pocock have identified the early eighteenth century as a pivotal moment in which the “image of a secular and historical future” first became an object of political contemplation and contestation, thanks especially to concerns about national indebtedness. But scholars have generally assumed that the futures crafted in the era were defined by fear, envisioning future generations left to reckon with catastrophe when all the debts came due. But there was another side to the futuristic coin: the aspirational (quixotic? deceptive?) mathematical speculation of Walpole’s Sinking Fund. By defining the government’s theoretical ability to repay its debts, the Sinking Fund gave the elusive concept of public credit a newly mathematical form. This mathematical conquest was also a distinctly gendered one; “Lady Credit” was subjected to a new kind of masculine authority. The story of Walpole’s Sinking Fund offers a glimpse of a political community first confronting the potential, and potential costs, of living a future ruled by number.