Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Plates, Figures and Tables
- Editorial Note
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Varieties of Innovation: Ireland, Scotland and the Financial Revolution 1688–1720
- 2 Banking and Investment on the Periphery: The Case of Ireland
- 3 Investment from the Periphery: Irish Investors in the South Sea Company in Comparative and Transnational Perspective
- 4 ‘Most of Our Money of This Kingdom is gone over to the South Sea’: Irish Investors and the South Sea Company
- 5 ‘Nothing here but Misery’? The Economic Impact of the South Sea Bubble on Ireland
- 6 ‘A Thing They Call a Bank’: Irish Projects in the South Sea Year
- 7 The Proposals for a National Bank and the Irish Investment Community in 1720
- 8 ‘A Strong Presumption That This Bank May be a Bubble’: Misreading the Bubble and the Bank of Ireland Debates, 1721
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Investment from the Periphery: Irish Investors in the South Sea Company in Comparative and Transnational Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Plates, Figures and Tables
- Editorial Note
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Varieties of Innovation: Ireland, Scotland and the Financial Revolution 1688–1720
- 2 Banking and Investment on the Periphery: The Case of Ireland
- 3 Investment from the Periphery: Irish Investors in the South Sea Company in Comparative and Transnational Perspective
- 4 ‘Most of Our Money of This Kingdom is gone over to the South Sea’: Irish Investors and the South Sea Company
- 5 ‘Nothing here but Misery’? The Economic Impact of the South Sea Bubble on Ireland
- 6 ‘A Thing They Call a Bank’: Irish Projects in the South Sea Year
- 7 The Proposals for a National Bank and the Irish Investment Community in 1720
- 8 ‘A Strong Presumption That This Bank May be a Bubble’: Misreading the Bubble and the Bank of Ireland Debates, 1721
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The South Sea bubble was the great crisis of the financial revolution. The rapid rise of the South Sea Company's share price in late spring and early summer 1720, followed by its even more dramatic collapse in late August through to early September, instantly became the stuff of myth and legend. News of events in London quickly spread, not just across England and Wales, or even to Scotland and Ireland, but also across the Channel to the European continent and beyond. The reverberations of the London stock-market crash were felt in major and minor financial markets: in Amsterdam, Paris and Hamburg, as well as in Berne, Berlin, Dublin and Edinburgh. This transnational impact of the bubble reflected both the profile of investors in the South Sea Company and the organization's own global interests. From its incorporation in 1711 as a trading concern focusing on the Spanish colonies in South America, the company attracted investors from beyond the traditional financial heartland of the City. This was, of course, not unusual for British joint-stock enterprises during the age of the financial revolution, but during the ‘year of the bubbles’ the South Sea Company would become the most cosmopolitan of these corporations, eclipsing the more established Royal African and East India companies. Indeed such was the range of its shareholders' origins during the bubble that it probably had one of the most internationally diverse investor bases of all the contemporary major European joint-stock companies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The South Sea Bubble and IrelandMoney, Banking and Investment, 1690–1721, pp. 59 - 84Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014