Shares of government debt and of business enterprises were not traded in North America on a significant scale until the later part of the eighteenth century, nearly a century after the development of organized securities trading in England. Long before they copied these English institutional arrangements, however, Americans inherited English ideas that would bear upon securities trading. These ideas and the processes by which they were transmitted to North America are discussed in section I of this chapter. Section II will describe the American securities market from its beginnings in the 1770s through the crash of 1792, with an emphasis on the experiences which shaped American attitudes toward securities trading. The resulting pattern of thought, copied from English sources and then modified in light of more recent local experience, will be analyzed in section III.

England's North American colonies were largely populated by emigrants from England, of course, who brought with them English attitudes toward speculation and toward securities markets. Communication between England and the colonies, moreover, was frequent enough in the eighteenth century to permit the colonies to share in contemporary trends in English thought, including the thought generated by the effects of the South Sea Bubble, and to permit the wealthiest Americans to invest in English securities. For these reasons, when the American economy became large enough to permit the development of securities trading, that practice was born into a world of preexisting thought.

Colonial attitudes toward speculation exhibited the same ambivalence as in England.