The History of Financial Advice

'The History of Financial Advice' provides the first thorough study of a genre of writing that has amassed a huge readership, and had major social and economic effects, but which has remained largely neglected by cultural and economic historians and by literary critics. As Lendol Calder writes in the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (2012), 'the print culture that helped people make sense of money through financial advice', still 'awaits its historian', despite the fact that 'concerns about money - how to get it, how to save it, how to invest, multiply and spend it - have likely sold more books in the last two hundred years than any other subject after religion'.

The project charts the history of personal financial advice literature as it has developed in Britain and the United States, ranging from the private letters and domestic advice manuals of the eighteenth century to the emergence of financial journalism and investment advice in the nineteenth century to the proliferation of popular financial novels, lifestyle guides and blogs in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on approaches to the study of rhetoric and narrative central to literary and cultural studies, the project investigates how works of financial advice have succeeded in appealing to the desires and fantasies of their readers, despite a lack of evidence for the efficacy of the investment strategies such works propound. Making use of the strand of social science known as 'Cultural Economy', the project also considers how financial advice has shaped public perceptions of, and activities in, financial markets, such that the genre has actively made and remade the very markets about which it advises.

The project team will make a major contribution to the scholarship on popular interactions with finance by researching and writing the first comprehensive study of the history of financial advice in Britain and the United States, beginning in the Financial Revolution of the early eighteenth century and moving through to the present. Members of the team will share this research with fellow researchers at prominent international conferences in the fields of cultural, economic and business history. The project team will also build on established relationships with representatives of the financial services industry, as well as financial regulators, educators, charities and policy makers, to share ideas in workshops, provide training sessions and collaborate in the development of initiatives in financial literacy, regulatory policy and professional practice. As part of the project, the team will collect, catalogue and annotate an archive of financial advice literature. Acquisition of the archive will be funded by the UK's first dedicated library of financial writing, run by Didasko the financial education charity, which will also provide a permanent home for the collection, where it will be available for consultation by students, academics, industry trainees and the general public, aided by a purpose-written guide produced by the project team. The key findings of the research will also be made readily and widely accessible to the public through the production of a short film to the made available online, with the working title 'What Three Centuries of Financial Advice Can Teach You'.

'The History of Financial Advice' will both mark a landmark in scholarship and achieve a major impact on the ways in which financial 'insiders' and 'outsiders' alike think about and participate in markets.

What the cultural commentator Randy Martin calls 'the financialization of daily life' means that increasing numbers of citizens have little choice but to act as personal portfolio managers. They are now responsible for assessing risks and seeking optimal strategies across an array of asset classes and liabilities, from investments, property and pensions to credit cards, mortgages and student debt, as the traditional structures of the welfare state (in the UK) and corporate welfare (in the US) are being eroded and privatised. Understandably, many such individuals turn to forms of popular financial advice in navigating their complex personal finances. In the absence of resources that would provide them with a clear understanding of the history of financial advice, its rhetorical forms and modes of address, and its social and economic effects, however, members of the public are likely to be ill-equipped adequately to assess and interpret the advice they consume. By the same token, financial professionals, policy makers, regulators, educators and journalists lack the detailed historical research into the changing social, economic and cultural functioning of financial advice that would help them to contextualize and evaluate their own practices and recommendations. In the wake of the global financial crisis, calls for the financial services industry and those concerned with it to attend to the 'culture' of finance have grown progressively louder; financial advice is an aspect of that culture that demands, especially urgently, to be more systematically researched and better understood, and 'The History of Financial Advice' meets this demand.

The project will benefit members of the general public by improving their understanding of the historical and present-day forms and functions of financial advice, enabling them to be more astute, knowledgeable and discerning consumers of such advice. The quality of public debate about financial advice will be significantly enriched by the establishment of an archive of financial advice literature - available for public consultation and fully annotated - at the UK's only dedicated library of financial writing, the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh; through the production of a short online-distributed film, with the working title 'What Three Centuries of Financial Advice Can Teach You'; and by means of social media, a project blog and other online outlets and regional and national press, television and radio.

Through a workshop organised by the Finance Foundation, the project will benefit financial policy makers, regulators and practitioners by assisting them to better grasp how financial advice has shaped popular perceptions of, and activities in, financial markets, and the social and economic consequences that have stemmed from such non-professional or 'vernacular' engagement.

Finally, the project will work with the UK's leading financial education and enterprise charity Young Enterprise to improve financial literary education (now a compulsory part of the National Curriculum), by developing new teaching materials drawn from the project's research findings.