Bruce Berkowitz, Playfair: The True Story of the British Secret Agent Who Changed How We See the World.
Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 2018. Xxiv + 477 pp. Maps, tables, figures, appendices, notes, and index. $34.85 U.S. (cl). ISBN 9781942695042.
Review by Anna Plassart, The Open University.

"Playfair had been deeply unimpressed with the inefficiencies and corruption of ancien régime France, and he originally sympathized with the French Revolution. Like many British moderate reformists, however, he was appalled by the increasing violence of the Revolution, and soon found himself on the payroll of the British government, tasked with writing anti-Jacobin pamphlets. By 1793, he had fled France and returned to London. There, he proposed to the British government, and subsequently enacted, a new strategy for economic warfare: setting up in a paper mill near Haughton Castle in northern England, he set out to flood the French republic with counterfeit assignats, in an effort to collapse its currency. While it is already well known that counterfeit assignats were being produced on a large scale both in France and abroad, one of the book’s most startling discoveries is Playfair’s direct involvement in what appears to have been a huge, government-backed enterprise. By 1793 the mill would have been producing 180,000 notes per week, according to Berkowitz’s calculations...."

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