Henry Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) established once and for all the notion that central banks have the prime responsibility for controlling the money stock and the price level. This theme and the analytical framework underlying it reappeared in the famous Bullion Report...

British monetary experience in the nineteenth century was extremely rich both in terms of the development of the quantity theory and in terms of the evolution of views of the role of the Bank of England in the international gold standard. One can ask, should or could the early Federal Reserve...