For almost 200 years, beginning in the late seventeenth century, the tontine essentially, a shared investment fund with benefit of survivorship - was a ubiquitous financial instrument. From meeting rooms to libraries, public baths to theatres, from armies to medicine and on to religion, the scheme was everywhere.
Starting in the late seventeenth century, for over 200 years the tontine was a ubiquitous financial instrument. As a revenue-raising tool of governments it supported the cost of war, and as a private capital-raising instrument it provided funding for numerous projects; including meeting rooms and libraries, prisons and theatres, and private residences and hotels.
While the tontine is known today mainly through fiction (Robert Louis Stevenson, Agatha Christie, and The Simpsons among others), this book tells the real history of how it evolved from a public revenue-raising scheme into a popular private investment and infrastructure financing tool, before being displaced by other financial instruments. Focusing on the early development of the tontine and with case studies from England, Ireland, France, Scotland, and the United States from the mid-seventeenth to the early- twentieth centuries, the narrative brings to life the story of a little-understood financial innovation.
This concise and engaging book is an ideal introduction to the history of the tontine for all readers interested in financial history.
