Involuntary Investors in British State-Building: Seamen’s Tickets and the Financial Revolution <i>c</i> .1700–1760

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between government liquidity, personal credit, and state practices in eighteenth-century Britain, drawing on a case study of seamen’s tickets: promises on paper issued to sailors by the Royal Navy to collect their wages at a future date. Because it was normal for tickets to remain unpaid for years, mariners and their households often sold them. To do so, they relied on an industry akin to modern payday lending. Tickets circulated within maritime communities and beyond, forming a financial market that existed in the shadows of the formal commercial paper economy sanctioned by the state. This article traces the contours of the ticket market in terms of its value, its actors, and its dynamics, as a crucial part of the invention of financial capitalism. It argues that British state-building and imperial expansion depended upon the involuntary investments of maritime labourers, whose wage debts were one of the largest categories of public debt in the eighteenth century. Focusing on the ticket trade expands the peripheries of Britain’s Financial Revolution, but it also complicates the agency and aspirations of the investors involved.