Download or read book Fictions of State written by Patrick Brantlinger and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money. Brantlinger traces the emergence of modern, imperial Great Britain from those foundations. He analyzes the process whereby nationalism, both the cause and the result of wars and imperial expansion, multiplied national debt and produced crises of public credit resolved only through more nationalism and war. During the first half of the eighteenth century, conservatives attacked public credit as fetishistic and characterized national debt as alchemical. From the 1850s, the stabilizing theories of public credit authored by David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Thornton, and others helped initiate the first "social science" economics.