Boom, Bust, and Beyond

New Perspectives on the 1720 Stock Market Bubble

Stefano Condorelli, Daniel Menning, Stefano Condorelli, Daniel Menning

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110592139
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

Few financial crises, historically speaking, have attracted such attention as the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles of 1719–20. The twin bubbles had major economic and political implications, sending shock waves through the whole of Europe; they astonished contemporaries, and, to a large extent, they still resonate today. This volume offers new readings of these events, drawing on fresh research and new evidence that challenge traditional interpretations. The chapters engage, in particular, with:

• the geographical frame of the 1719-20 bubbles
• their social, cultural, economic and political impact
• the ways in which contemporaries understood speculation
• the contributions and impact of a diverse array of participants
• popular and print memorialization of the events

Overall, the volume helps to rewrite the history of the 1719–20 bubbles and to recontextualize their place within eighteenth-century history.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Boom, Bust and Beyond – An Introduction
• I. Broadening the Geographical Frame
• The Rise and Fall of a New Credit System. Transnational Financial Experiments and Domestic Power Struggles in Sweden, 1710–1720
• Chartering Companies. A Dialogue about the Timeline and the Actors of the Pan-European 1720 Stock Euphoria
• Linen and Lotteries: The Anatomy of an English Bubble Company in Germany
• The Mississippi Bubble in Saint-Domingue (Haiti)
• II. Engaging with Traditional Narratives
• When First We Practice to Deceive: An Alternative Account of the South Sea Bubble
• The Bubble and the Bail-Out: The South Sea Company, Jacobitism, and Public Credit in Early Hanoverian Britain
• The Economic Effect of the South Sea Bubble on the Baltic Sea Trade
• The Long Shadow of the South Sea Bubble: Memory, Financial Crisis, and the Charitable Corporation Scandal of 1732
• III. Understanding Speculation – Micro to Macro
• “L’on entend tant dire pour et contre, que le plus habile doit agir au pure hasard.” A Case Study on one Investor’s Decision-making in the Mississippi Bubble
• Order from Chaos Springs: The Bubbles of 1720 as a Turning Point in Western Conceptualizations of Causality and Order
• “We have been ruined by Whores”: Perceptions of Female Involvement in the South Sea Scheme
• To Think the Unthinkable. Early Financial Theories (Late 17th–18th Century)
• From Bubble to Speculation – Eighteenth-Century Readings of the 1720s
• Selected Bibliography
• Index