Balancing Debt in the Absence of Money: Documentary Credit in New South Wales, 1817-20

John Booker and Russell Craig

Business History, 2002, vol. 44, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: This article analyses three sources of financial data recording details of bills of exchange and promissory note transactions in the New South Wales (NSW) colony, 1817-20. These sources are the minute books and the customer accounts ledger of the Bank of NSW, and the records of the Supreme Court of Civil Jurisdiction, Sydney. We show how documentary credit was employed to balance debt in a currency-deprived colonial society. The analytical perspective is microeconomic, using the lens provided by the transactions of the convicted Margate embezzler and Sydney dealer, John Croaker. An eight-step protocol is introduced to show how to calculate conservative money-denominated estimates of turnover and 'profit' for traders in the colony. This protocol has potential to provide important commercially related dimensions to the biographical profiles of dealers, traders and merchants - not only in NSW, but in similar societies as well.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/713999258 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:44:y:2002:i:1:p:1-20

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/713999258

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().