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Economic warfare, in the form of commerce predation, was a crucial part of Britain's strategy in the West Indies during the American War of Independence. The rebels relied on a flow of goods provided by Spanish, French, Dutch and British merchants which British warships and privateers tried to stem. Britain's peaceful relations with the other three powers in the region depended greatly on being perceived to justly conduct economic warfare without breaking maritime law or bilateral treaties. British strategy during the war, therefore, was a fine line between crippling the rebels through aggressive commerce predation without giving cause for grievance to the other regional powers. The war opened several commercial opportunities in the form of smuggling and privateering. Merchants intentionally blurred the boundaries between enemies and allies to suit a given commercial venture. These blurred boundaries in the Americas were problematic for British ministers and Admiralty officials entrusted with prosecuting the war. Maritime treaties and international law were constantly reinterpreted in an attempt to avoid ruptures with other colonial powers, achieve Britain's war aims, and lend credence to British policy.

The end of the 18th century was one of the most innovative periods in the history of securitization. Public markets for mortgage-backed securities are among the most interesting developments of the period. In The Netherlands, a network of merchant investment bankers used sophisticated methods for structuring loans based on overseas properties as collateral. In 1793, the Holland Land Company issued two structured notes to purchase millions of acres in Western New York. In 1794, the purchase and development of property in the newly-designated capital city of Washington D.C. was financed by mortgage-backed bonds underwritten by Dutch merchants. These securities raise questions about why investors trusted in the value of overseas property as collateral, and whether the expected rates of return on the instruments were commensurate with their risk. In our analysis, we address these questions by exploring how the early mortgage-backed securities were based on earlier collateralized fixed income instruments in the Dutch market, as well as other 18th century experiments with securitization and collateralization of land. We argue that these innovative securities resulted from an institutional framework that easily accommodated novel fixed income issues, and came on the heels of large gains to market speculation in American debt.

This chapter considers the status of geometrical and kinematic representations in the foundations of 18th century analysis and in Kant’s understanding of those foundations. It has two aims. First, relying on relatively recent reassessments of the history of analysis, it will attempt to bring forward a more accurate account of intuitive representation in 18^th century analysis and the relation between British and Continental mathematics. Second, it will give a better account of Kant’s place in that history. The result shows that although Kant did no better at navigating the labyrinth of the continuum than his contemporaries, he had a more interesting and reasonable account of the foundations of analysis than an easy reading of either Kant or that history provides. It also permits a more accurate and interesting account of how and when a conception of foundations of analysis without intuitive representations emerged, and how that paved the way for Bolzano and Cauchy.