Product details
- ISBN 9781032792064
- Weight: 200g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 22 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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From the last decades of the seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, the tontine, in one form or another, was a ubiquitous financial instrument. As a revenue-raising tool of governments it supported the cost of war, and as a private capital-raising instrument it provided funding for civic improvement and urban development projects.
While the tontine is known today mainly through fictional works (Robert Louis Stevenson, Agatha Christie, and The Simpsons among others), this book tells the history of how it evolved from a public revenue-raising scheme into a popular private investment and infrastructure financing tool, before it was displaced by cheaper forms of borrowing. Focusing on the early development of the tontine, and with European and North American case studies, the narrative brings to life the story of a little-understood financial innovation.
This concise and engaging book is an ideal introduction to the history of the tontine for all readers interested in financial history.
Andrew McDiarmid earned his PhD from the University of Dundee and attended Yale University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on financial history from the early modern period to the twentieth century, with his first monograph on the subject of the Scottish Financial Revolution released in 2023. He is currently the SFI/IRC pathways fellow at University College Dublin, where he is undertaking a major project exploring the history of tontines between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
