This book is about the regulation of the earliest securities markets in England and the United States. Because that regulation was the product of widespread attitudes toward securities markets, the book necessarily discusses those attitudes as well. And because popular attitudes toward securities trading depended heavily (although not entirely) on what the market was like at any given time, the book is as much about the institution being regulated as it is about the regulation itself.

The subject is one that has been, with a few minor exceptions, largely overlooked. Accounts of securities regulation in the United States tend to begin with the Securities Act of 1933, or at best with the state “blue sky” laws of the preceding two decades. When the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries receive any attention, they are usually brushed aside with the poorly informed assumption that securities markets were subject to no law at all. As one account of the nineteenth-century market puts it, “speculators were bound by no rules beyond the natural ones of the market.” Or in the words of one widely-used American securities law treatise, “[s]ecurities regulation in this country began around the turn of the century”. The assumption should seem dubious to anyone familiar with Anglo-American legal history, and this book will demonstrate its falsity. During the period covered by this book, English and American securities markets were intensively regulated – in some respects, more intensively than they are regulated today.