That 1672 ban was still in effect when another--and much bigger--round of private token issuance started a bit over a century later. It was those illicit private coiners who showed the Royal Mint how to solve "The Big Problem of Small Change." 1/n
https://twitter.com/jp_koning/status/1331563961750347782
Despite what Sargent and Velde, Angela Redish, and many numismatists have claimed, the key to the solution was _not_ steam-powered coining presses. It was, most fundamentally, and in a word, _competition_. See here for my most detailed argument on this: jstor.org/stable/2322655…
See also jstor.org/stable/3698572…. My book Good Money, which includes a version of the second article, tells the whole surprisingly dramatic story. (It also has very nice pictures!) amazon.com/Good-Money-Bir…
Incidentally, I had a devil of a time getting these works into print: certain anonymous referees did all they could to to spike them. I suspect they were the same persons who wouldn't trouble to correspond with me when I shared my work in progress with them.
One whom I telephoned pretended to have lost interest in the topic, and then went on to tell Yale U.P. not to publish my "polemic." (They didn't.) One learns a lot about scholarly integrity by trying to refute the conclusions of well-known scholars!
In fact the "steam power" story was hardly original: it had long been conventional wisdom among numismatists, who themselves swallowed--hook, line, and sinker-- Matthew Boulton's overblown claims for his steam presses ("Hot Air"), aimed at securing a regal coinage contract.
(Another economist proponent of the steam-power theory made a point of leaving the room when I presented my work at an economic history conference we both attended.)🙉
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