Publisher's Synopsis
By the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Britain was awarded the asiento, the lucrative monopoly of the slave trade in Spanish America, essentially equivalent to a license to print money. The South Sea Company proceeded to do essentially that; it sold artificially appreciating shares of its stock far more profitably than it conducted actual trade.
In September 1720, the outrageously inflated stock of the South Sea Company crashed, leaving thousands of investors, high and low, more or less ruined. The nephew of the Company's founding director slit his own throat. James Stanhope, the leader of the Whig party, protested his own (dubious) innocence so strenuously in the House of Lords that he had a stroke and died on the spot. It was the report of an obscure journalist that caused the stock to crash which, in turn, exposed hundreds of Parliament's members, crown officials, and the king himself as having appropriated public funds for private investment in a spiking stock.
The South Sea Bubble is the lively account of a pivotal moment in history and a radical paradigm shift in the public awareness of financial and governmental practices. Carl Estabrook assembles a commanding cast of first-hand accounts and court records, while also gathering the published works of journalists, commentators, literary figures, dramatists, and other ephemera of the period to offer a fresh and intriguing examination of the grandfather of all financial and political scandals.
