John Law

I hear all the time about John Law. He’s the guy with a long arm, who will catch you when you do bad things. I became curi­ous: I’ve heard about him many times, but I don’t real­ly know who John Law is. For­tu­nate­ly, I have my set of Cham­ber­s’s Ency­clo­pe­dia, 1883 Edi­tion handy. Yes, I could have googled it, but that takes all the fun out, does­n’t it?

Turns out John Law was born the son of a Scot­tish banker and gold­smith in 1671. He showed tremen­dous tal­ent for math­e­mat­ics, and had great promise of a career in Lon­don’s fash­ion­able cir­cles. He fled Lon­don after killing a rival in a duel, and spent time as a fugi­tive in Ams­ter­dam, study­ing the work­ings of bank­ing and cred­it. Upon return­ing to Edin­burgh, he lob­bied the Scot­tish par­lia­ment to adopt a paper cur­ren­cy, a pro­pos­al which was met with much skepticism.

Turn­ing his ener­gies else­where, he wan­dered around Europe amass­ing a great deal of wealth from gam­bling while he tried to con­vince var­i­ous Euro­pean gov­ern­ments to change their finance laws. After start­ing a pri­vate bank in France, he even­tu­al­ly con­vinced the French gov­ern­ment to form a nation­al bank and issue paper notes. He was made the Comp­trol­ler-Gen­er­al of Finances in France until the nation­al bank became insol­vent, where­upon John Law fled France and spent the rest of his life gam­bling in Venice.

As a side note, I actu­al­ly found the entry on John Law when I was look­ing for infor­ma­tion on Por­cian and Sem­pron­ian Law, hav­ing read men­tion of them in Edward Gib­bon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It turns out that John Law had a broth­er William, with whom he went into the bank­ing busi­ness for a short peri­od. It’s not clear whether it is the same William Law, but Cham­ber­s’s has an entry on a William Law who was John’s con­tem­po­rary just fif­teen years John’s junior. William Law was famed for his reli­gious writ­ings and was for some time the tutor to Edward Gib­bon, father to the his­to­ri­an Edward Gib­bon, author of the book that led me to look up Law in the encyclopedia.

Talk about your six degrees of Fran­cis Bacon. Kin­da spooky, eh?