The Bubble Act New Perspectives from Passage to Repeal and Beyond

This book reassesses the actual effects of the Bubble Act, still popularly associated with the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. The book builds on the foundational work of Ron Harris to discuss the act’s effect on corporate governance, literary culture, colonial law, and the Industrial Revolution. The Bubble Act was deemed an empty letter within England itself as it was rarely used in legal proceedings. Several chapters consider whether this was the case outside England, from Scotland to the Americas, India, and Africa. Others assess the impact of the act, both on literary culture and in the history of economic thought. The act has been conceptualized as a brake on economic development or of little consequence. This edited collection offers a timely reassessment of the Bubble Act and its legacy.  

Introduction.- The Bubble Act and the First Corporate Economy.- ‘Mr Morice is said to appear at the head’: The Bubble Act and an Aborted Joint-Stock Slave-Trading Company.- ‘That ever-memorable year of epidemical infatuation’: Incorporation, the Jamaica Mines Company, and the Bubble Act of 1720.- Pamphlet Poetry and the South Sea Bubble.- Decoding the Bubble: Popular Magic, Financial Deception, and Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia.- Consequences Unintended: The Bubble Act and American Independence.- Capitalism by Generalists: The Governance of the Ayr Bank and the Emergence of Professionalism in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scottish Banking.- Royal Charters, Royal Power, and the Business of Empire.- Babbage’s Age of Speculation: Calculating the Value of Life After the Repeal of the Bubble Act.- The Repeal of the Bubble Act and the Debate Between the Currency School and the Banking School.- Agency Houses in Bengal and the Indigo Bubble.- Epilogue.

Helen Paul is a Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton and an honorary associate professor at UCL. She was the Honorary Secretary of the Economic History Society and now serves on the Council of the Royal Historical Society. She studied at Oxford and St Andrews.

Nicholas Di Liberto is an honorary assistant researcher at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, UCL. He is co-editor and translator of Jean Lescure, General and Periodic Crises of Overproduction (2023), and translator of Albert Aftalion, Periodic Crises of Overproduction (forthcoming).

D’Maris Coffman is the Professor of Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at UCL. She is also Director of the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management. She is editor-in-chief of Elsevier’s Structural Change and Economic Dynamics and an editor of the Palgrave Studies inthe History of Finance.