The attitudes toward the market engendered by the Bubble remained latent in English culture in the decades that followed. They would reemerge during every market downturn for the rest of the eighteenth century, even as participation in the market continued to grow and securities trading grew more familiar. Section I will describe this bifurcated pattern of thought. Section II will examine a similar pattern in Parliament: Whenever stock prices endured a period of sustained decline, Parliament would again consider legislation designed to limit the perceived excesses of stockjobbers. Although the only statute to come out of this process was Sir John Barnard's Act, passed in 1734 and surviving with limited actual effect for over a century, more drastic measures were regularly proposed. Yet the market's increasing familiarity and respectability, its very ordinariness, over the course of the century prevented any of these later proposals from becoming law. In Barnard's Act, and in some of the bills never passed by Parliament, we can see the early models for the American securities regulation of the following century. Finally, section III will examine the ways in which the courts facilitated the development of the securities market in the eighteenth century. In the courts as well, decisions made in England in the eighteenth century would heavily influence decisions to be made later in the United States.

In 1780, Christopher Anstey noticed that an old word – “speculation” – had taken on a new meaning.