Nature's Evil

In March 1721, Peter the Great of Russia ordered his College of Mines to offer John Law a princely title, the rank of active privy councillor, the order of St Andrew, and estates with 2,000 households and 6,000 serfs. Law would also have the right to build towns, invite foreign manufactories and create trading companies. In return, Law was expected to put Russian trade with Persia on a new footing and fill the state coffers with a million roubles in silver. Having conquered the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, Peter wanted to found a Persian trading company, giving to it extensive rights along the lines of the Mississippi Company. The east was still seen as full of treasures; Peter’s idea was that a new Silk Road would run through Russian territory, providing the crown with tariffs. 9 A new city at the estuary of the River Kura, where it drained into the Caspian Sea, would give the empire the industry which the city at the estuary of the Neva had long failed to provide. To achieve all this, Peter needed John Law, who was at that moment a bankrupt and a refugee. But Law didn’t accept Peter the Great’s invitation. Perhaps he knew how difficult it would be to get a million roubles in silver from the shores of the Caspian Sea, devastated by war.

At the peak of the market boom Law was believed to be the richest person of his time apart from kings, but he hung on to his shares right up until the crash. After fleeing Paris in a borrowed carriage, he succeeded in saving a few of his assets. When he died eight years later in Venice he left a big art collection – eighty-one crates of paintings, including canvases by Leonardo and Titian. The collection was to be shipped to Amsterdam, but the ship ran into a storm and the canvases got drenched. Out of all that wealth, only a few paintings survived.

In 1828 another talented schemer, Alexander Griboyedov, the Russian ambassador to Persia, presented the government with the idea of a Transcaucasian company. The idea – to capitalise on Persian trade and the fertile lands of the Caucasus – was the same one that Peter had proposed to Law. Griboyedov modelled his ‘project’ on the British East India Company. He asked the government to give his company land, the right to resettle serfs from central Russia, and to be free from all taxes, duties and conscription for fifty years. According to Griboyedov’s calculations, Russian merchants were spending huge sums, more than 10 million roubles a year, on purchasing colonial materials – cloth, sugar, dyes, dried fruits – from the British East India Company; the new Transcaucasian company would substitute its own products for these imports. 10 The plan was rejected, and Griboyedov was killed in a massacre in Tehran. Like Defoe, he was more successful as a writer than as a ‘projecter’ – he is remembered today for his comedy

Woe from Wit

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Cantillon

In pioneering the banking business in France, the Scot John Law was joined by another unlikely hero, the Irishman Richard Cantillon. Like many in the social sciences, Cantillon was a political refugee. His parents were Irish Catholics, and their estate was confiscated by the English. Cantillon moved to France and began working in the new bank founded by Law, first as an employee and then as a junior partner. Having made money with the Mississippi Company, by 1719 he decided that the boom had reached its peak, and sold his shares. He was too hasty; the shares he sold tripled in value before they became worthless. This sale of securities brought him into conflict with Law, and he left for Italy. Later, in 1734, Cantillon was burnt to death in his own home in the centre of London. His cook was suspected of having started the fire – he disappeared with documents and jewels. Later a certain Chevalier de Louvigny was discovered in distant Surinam. Allegedly, he possessed papers and other things which belonged to Cantillon. Antoin E. Murphy from Trinity College Dublin, who has written Cantillon’s biography, believes that this chevalier was actually Cantillon, who had himself started the fire in London and fled to Surinam. 11 If he had lived in Surinam for another twenty years he might well have met Candide and his accidental friend, the mutilated slave. I think Cantillon would have loved to talk to them.