John Fullarton's 'Response to a proposal for a Bank of India'

Abstract

This paper introduces a previously unpublished manuscript of the Banking School writer John Fullarton. Despite his importance as a monetary theorist nothing is known of the development of Fullarton's monetary thought. The manuscript published here was written by Fullarton in India in 1836 in response to a proposal for the establishment of a Bank of India. It is an important discovery, not only because it is the first known economic work of one of the nineteenth century's most important writers on money and banking but also because it shows that Fullarton had developed views consistent with his later Banking School theory much earlier than previously believed.