caa a22 4500 388040440 CHVBK 20180307125019.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199812 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S1053837200002480 doi S1053837200002480 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S1053837200002480 Poitras Geoffrey Robert Torrens and the Evolution of the Real Bills Doctrine [Elektronische Daten] [Geoffrey Poitras] In the current era of quantity theorists and inconvertible currencies, the real bills doctrine has received a surprising amount of recent attention (e.g., Sargent and Wallace, 1982; Smith, 1988; Selgin, 1989; Cunningham, 1992). While the real bills doctrine has a long history, the doctrine underwent considerable evolution during the period from the Bullionist debates of the Restriction Period, 1797-1819, to the Banking School versus Currency School debates surrounding the introduction of Peel's Act in 1844. The debates of the Restriction period are significant for being directly concerned with the workings of an inconvertible, real-bills-based paper currency while the later debates involved the real bills doctrine under convertibility. A primary objective of this paper is to explore the views that Robert Torrens held concerning the inconvertible and convertible versions of the real bills doctrine as a rule for central bank policy. Torrens's contributions as an anti-bullionist and, later, as a leading member of the Currency School reflect the importance that both convertibility and bank lending practices have for interpreting the real bills doctrine and the related law of reflux. The apparently paradoxical evolution of Torrens's monetary thought identified by Lionel Robbins (1958) is attributed primarily to the evolution of his views on bank lending practices. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Journal of the History of Economic Thought Cambridge University Press 20/4(1998-12), 479-498 1053-8372 20:4<479 1998 20 HET https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837200002480 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837200002480 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Poitras Geoffrey NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of the History of Economic Thought Cambridge University Press 20/4(1998-12), 479-498 1053-8372 20:4<479 1998 20 HET CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge