Counterfeit Currency and the Criminal Law in Commercialising Scotland

When John Currie was banished for forging notes of the Bank of Scotland in 1728,2 Scotland had just gained its second chartered bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and was very much a pre-industrial society.3 Yet the rhetorical questions posed in this broadside and the anxieties that underpin them speak, in an uncannily perspicacious way, to the experience of currency use, and misuse, in Scotland across much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.