The first three sections illustrate how the British establishment viewed gilts mispricing around 1870, and how the markets reacted to a government debt conversion proposal of that year. This is followed by a section on general government policy towards investors in national debt instruments....

British government bonds formed the deepest, most liquid, and most transparent financial market of the 19th century. This paper shows that those bonds had long periods, extending over decades, of anomalous behavior, in which Consols, the largest and best known of these instruments, were...