Much is known about the negotiation of personal credit relationships during the eighteenth century. It has been noted how direct contact and observation allowed individuals to assess the creditworthiness of those with whom they had financial connections and to whom they might lend money. Much less is known about one of the most important credit relationships of the long eighteenth century: that between the state and its creditors. This article shows that investors could experience the performance of public credit at the Bank of England. By 1760 the Bank was the manager of nearly three-quarters of the state's debt and housed the main secondary market in that debt. Thus, it provided a place for public creditors, both current and potential, to attend and scrutinize the performance of the state's promises. The article demonstrates how the Bank acted to embody public credit through its architecture, internal structures, and imagery and through the very visible actions of its clerks and the technologies that they used to record ownership and transfer of the national debt. The Bank of England, by those means, allowed creditors to interrogate the financial stability and reputation of the state in the same ways that they could interrogate the integrity of a private debtor.

中文翻译：

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在十八世纪的英格兰银行执行公共信贷

关于 18 世纪的个人信用关系谈判，人们了解很多。已经注意到直接接触和观察如何使个人能够评估与他们有经济联系以及他们可能借钱的人的信誉。关于漫长的 18 世纪最重要的信用关系之一：国家与其债权人之间的关系，人们知之甚少。本文表明，投资者可以在英格兰银行体验公共信贷的表现。到 1760 年，该银行管理了该州近四分之三的债务，并为该债务提供了主要的二级市场。因此，它为当前和潜在的公共债权人提供了一个参与和审查国家承诺履行情况的场所。这篇文章展示了银行如何通过其架构、内部结构和图像以及通过其职员的非常明显的行为以及他们用来记录国债所有权和转移的技术来体现公共信用。通过这些方式，英格兰银行允许债权人以与询问私人债务人的诚信相同的方式询问国家的金融稳定性和声誉。