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Who Is William Paterson?

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This was William Paterson, promoter of the Hampstead Water Company, guiding light in the failed Scottish attempt to colonise Panama in the 1690s, reformer of the public credit, propagandist for Anglo-Scottish Union, and government agent: to his enemies the Pedlar, Tub-preacher, and at last Whimsical Projector; to his admirers the apostle of free trade, a wronged commercial genius and, above all, father of the Bank of England and hence leading financial revolutionary.
The accelerating pace of financial innovation, the pressures of international trading rivalry and European war, and the lop-sided relationship between the kingdoms of England and Scotland all presented Paterson with opportunities for projecting and self-promotion. Williams successful …show more content…

After pressing the idea of an interventionist Council of Trade to direct Scottish commerce in 1700, Paterson soon switched his allegiances once more to support an incorporating Union between England and Scotland. In 1700, the Marquess of Queensberry had thought Paterson just the person to write opposing any revival of the Scottish colonial plans, and by 1705, Paterson was speaking of the Company as 'a weapon which I was misfortunately concerned in the …show more content…

The Bank of England was far from the firstborn among Paterson's brainchildren, though it was the only one to survive infancy. Paterson himself didn't stay with the bank long enough will manage the wanted impact for tipping those scales for global money related - and Subsequently military - energy done great about William and the Protestant enthusiasm toward Europe. The minute-book of the Court of Directors, the Bank's central administrative body, for 1694-95 tells a tale of Paterson's overreaching, the Court's censure, and his final ignominious resignation. The Directors of the Bank could only see this as a threat to their own commercial interests and the investment pool which supplied the infant Bank. Those Darien settlements might have been Paterson's lord Charles' head, an surprising fixation he compelled upon Any individual who might listen, and should which he instantly come back following as much retreat from those banks. Paterson finally make his dream come true when he persuaded the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies to put its substantial capital behind his colonial scheme in

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