Professor Anne Murphy
Summary
I am Professor of History and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. I joined the ºÚÁÏ³Ô¹Ï in March 2021. Prior to this I worked at the University of Hertfordshire, starting there as a lecturer in History in 2009 and subsequently serving as Head of History, Associate Dean Research and latterly as Dean of the School of Humanities. Academia is my second career. I previously spent twelve years working in the City trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives.
My research focuses on early modern financial markets and investment behaviour and the organisation and management of the 18th-century Bank of England. My publications include articles in Past and Present, Economic History Review, History, Financial History Review and Women's History Review. My monograph published by Cambridge University Press entitled was winner of the Economic History Society’s first monograph prize in 2010. I have also published a sourcebook for the British Academy Records of Social and Economic History series entitled .
I am currently working on a monograph: Virtuous Bankers: a day in the life of the late eighteenth-century Bank of England. The book presents an in-depth study of the eighteenth-century Bank of England at work. The narrative follows a day in the life of the institution beginning as the gates open at dawn and continuing through a twenty-four hour cycle. It ranges from the quiet mundanities of issuing notes and keeping ledgers via the noise and chaos of the financial market and the threat from rioting crowds to the aesthetics of one of London’s finest buildings and the messages of creditworthiness embedded in that architecture and in the very visible actions of the Bank’s clerks. This book will explain why the Bank owned by, and operated for, the benefit of its shareholders came to be thought of as ‘a great engine of state’ and how this private organisation became the guardian of the public credit upon which was based the economic and geopolitical strength of Britain during the long eighteenth century.