In the early modern period, commercial actors and their idiosyncratic practices took up a great deal of space in public conversation. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slave trade, for example, was an ongoing phenomenon that generated a wealth of printed texts, offering everything from sailing directions to information about trading practices in particular regions on the African coast. Specific financial events, too, such as the market crashes in Paris and London during the summer and winter of 1720, generated newspaper articles, pamphlets and books, amounting to thousands of pages of printed text. And all the while, more day-to-day financial questions, such as the question of proper interest rates, threaded through the lives of early modern states and their inhabitants. These questions, too, found expression in public conversation and printed text. Over centuries, subjects and citizens debated rates of return, both public and private: too high, too low, rising, falling, better, worse.

As our research projects demonstrate, early modern commercial actors often had different conversations in private, amongst themselves, than the ones they were having in public. Large-scale slave trade outfitters knew that public information about the African coast was full of inaccuracy, and constructed their own proprietary knowledge bases to further their odds of financial success. The political economists who dominated public writing about finance in the 1730s and 1740s had, themselves, been personally involved in the financial crisis of 1720, and pondered, privately, the extent and character of their own culpability. And conversations about appropriate rates of return had many different faces, depending on whether thinkers had in mind borrowers or lenders, foreigners or locals, the rich or the poor, the public interest or their own private concerns.

This panel does not address the divide between private and public conversation as a matter of conspiracy, but rather as a straightforward set of questions: how did the private and public conversations among commercial actors inform one another? How did private conversations take shape in the context of public political dialogue, and how did public dialogue proceed when it was led by vocal individuals who shared some opinions only with private groups of fellow thinkers and investors? Dr. Anne Ruderman will discuss the way that slave-ship outfitters developed market knowledge about consumer demand on the African coast. Dr. Trevor Jackson will discuss the intellectual and political construction of the financial crisis of 1720, which was done by expert elites who had to come to terms with their own roles in the infamous affair. And Dr. Hannah Farber will trace the political, cultural, and institutional history of early American interest rates—a set of numbers that had local, national, and transnational lives, and that figured in the humblest private transactions as well as the most consequential public ones.