The source is "A History of Florence 1200-1575" by John M. Najemy, pages 140-1

I’ve been reading about the Bank Restriction Period. In 1797 the Bank of England stopped exchanging its notes for gold, and that lasted over twenty years, right through the Napoleonic Wars.

What surprises me is that it didn’t end in a currency collapse like the French assignats a few years earlier. There was inflation, and the Bullion Report in 1810 argued the Bank had over-issued, but the pound came through it and convertibility was restored in 1821.

So what made the difference? Was it the Bank’s reputation, the expectation that gold would eventually come back, Parliament’s credibility, or just that Britain was winning the war? I’d also love to know how ordinary people and businesses experienced it day to day. Did they actually trust the notes, or were there workarounds?

Any book or paper recommendations would be great.

The story of how the British Empire got rich is one of the most distorted chapters in modern history. For generations, textbooks have told us that Britain became the wealthiest nation on Earth through industrial genius, scientific innovation, and sheer hard work. The steam engine. The spinning jenny. The factory system. But when you follow the actual money trail through tax ledgers, shipping manifests, and the private letters of the men who built the empire, a very different picture emerges.

In this deep-dive investigation, we uncover the real origins of British imperial wealth, from the 1600 royal charter that created the East India Company to the hidden offshore financial empire that still operates out of the City of London today. We trace the Battle of Plassey in 1757, where a thirty-two-year-old clerk named Robert Clive used bribes, forged treaties, and a conspiracy with Mir Jafar to seize the richest province in India for a private corporation. We examine the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1770, which killed between seven and ten million people while East India Company revenues actually increased. We explore the Caribbean sugar economy, the transatlantic slave trade, and the long-suppressed thesis of Eric Williams, whose 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery was not published in a mainstream British edition until 2022.

We also break down the single most shocking fiscal fact in British history. In 1833, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act and paid twenty million pounds, roughly forty percent of the national budget, to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. The enslaved people themselves received nothing. The loan taken out to finance that payment was not fully paid off until 2015.