Lessons from Three Centuries of Financial Advice: A Showcase of Research in the Economic Humanities
University of Edinburgh, 5 December 2018.

To coincide with this year’s FSN conference in Edinburgh, Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh will be hosting an event to showcase their latest research on the history of financial advice. Attendance is free, but please reserve a place here.

Books purporting to make their readers wealthy – often through investments in stocks or other financial assets – are perennially popular, but the history of this genre is only now being uncovered. This event showcases research from the three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded “History of Financial Advice” project, which has traced the investment advice genre from its origins in the print culture of eighteenth-century London to its explosion across multiple platforms and media in the present. 

Scholars, industry professionals, educators, and members of the public are invited to learn about the ingenious (if often unfounded) methods presented by financial writers as means of beating the market. Members of the project team will also outline the project’s work with schools and universities to develop new financial literacy curricula as well as its collaboration with the Edinburgh-based Library of Mistakes to build an annotated collection of investment advice literature.

 

Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh