(2001), and The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath (2005). He is nearing completion of his edition of James Boswell's journals in Italy and France for the research edition of the Boswell papers published by Edinburgh University Press.
Eglin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency, and reported the following:
As it happens, page 99 of The Gambling Century provides as accurate a sample of the book’s themes and arguments as any other individual page chosen at random would! We might well ask what the chances are of that — raising an important question (in a book that deals with probability, after all) to which I’ll return. Serendipitously, page 99 falls at a section break in its chapter. At the end of the section entitled “The Stamp of Approval,” the reader learns of the futility of one official effort to regulate gambling, namely the imposition of increasingly heavy taxation on playing cards and dice through the medium of stamp duties of the sort to which American colonists objected in 1765. The next section, “Drawing a Blank,” begins to expose the ulterior motive that the British Crown was pursuing when it sought to close gambling off to middle income individuals that it saw as the primary market for its lotteries (which were less like the Powerball and more like bond issues).Learn more about The Gambling Century at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99, then, speaks to two major themes of the book: first, the factors that undercut official efforts to proscribe or regulate commercial gambling, and second, the government’s own complicity in gambling ventures. To the first point, authorities tasked with policing gambling consistently failed in their objectives from their inability to understand how commercial gambling operations worked, and why they were so profitable. Officials persisted in believing that unwary players were being cheated by “sharpers,” professional tricksters of the sort found in novels and plays, rather than recognizing that mathematical probability guaranteed gambling entrepreneurs a profit. On the second point, the Crown actively sponsored enterprises like the Royal Oak Lottery, which despite its name was a game of chance similar to roulette. For another example, the royal household was exempted from legislation that regulated stakes, and housed an official, the Groom Porter, who was allowed to keep what amounted to a casino in royal residences under royal auspices.
One important point that emerges from the book’s exploration of these themes is that it took about a century for everyone — gamblers, gambling entrepreneurs, and government officials — to absorb fully the lessons of probability. Until the middle of the 18th century, gambling operators promoted games like faro that featured long odds, or games like hazard that allowed them to collect “box money,” essentially user fees collected independently of wins or losses. As they began to understand that time as well as chance favored the “house,” games began to appear that featured nearly “even money” odds, such as Rouge et Noir, and EO, the ancestor of roulette.
Appropriately enough, in the end, Victorian legislation brought the gambling century to a close, but important shifts in notions of respectability, newly associated with that bankable commodity known as credit, paved the way (as did judicial rulings that prevented gambling creditors from collecting gambling debts via civil action).
--Marshal Zeringue
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