Shipwreck with Speculator Early Modern Representations of Risk and Gambling

One of the timeliest and most prescient books I’ve come across in the last fifteen years is Edward Chancellor’s popular history of financial speculation Devil take the Hindmost. Chancellor had worked as an investment banker for Lazard Brothers in London and had contributed to the Financial Times and The Economist and so was well acquainted with what he called “This Bubble World” (3), echoing the poet Francis Quarles’s seventeenth-century work Emblems. “What’s lighter than the mind,” Quarles asked, “A thought. Than thought? This bubble world” (qtd. in Chancellor 3). Chancellor’s pleasant book itself is “light” reading, certainly not a work of philosophy, as I had been used to, with its dizzying arguments, something less than that as a thought is less than the mind. And yet not quite a scholarly history, where ideas take on the dramatic role of players, something less than that. What is less than that? The thing called speculation and our derivative world of modernity. Number 22 June 2013