Bills of exchange are essentially checks. Strictly speaking, a check is a bill of exchange drawn on a bank. At some point, the associations of U.S. high priests decided to call them “drafts”. I would be interested to know what about alien merchants’ acceptance of British drafts caused net capital inflows to the City of London.

My standard of linguistic precision here was unmet. Please see:

Bills of exchange are essentially checks. Strictly speaking, a check is a bill of exchange drawn on a bank. At some point, the associations of U.S. high priests decided to call bills of exchange “drafts”. I would be interested to know what about alien merchants’ acceptance of British drafts caused net capital inflows to the City of London.

Bruce:

I believe that in British business, one business honoring another business’ checks is a strong sign that both firms are pretty close to being partners.

Do you mean anything other than that one British business is taking another British business’s checks for ultimate deposit with a bank?

No idea about net capital inflows or outflows. I think every business in Europe in the Napoleonic wars was hiding capital from the government shakedowns to pay for war.

International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that, with his crude Colbertism, Napoleon assumed it to be…

Objection: smug mind-reading from the grave.

The Continental System damaged precisely those people who had done well from Napoleon’s regime and had hitherto been his strongest supporters: the middle classes, tradesmen, merchants and better-off peasantry, the acquirers of biens nationaux property he had always sought to help.

When was the last (until WWII) case of the Brits (plus the choir) not saying something like this about any instance of protectionism abroad? Yet somehow the poor damaged classes quite often remained its strong supporters.