Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Plates, Figures and Tables
- Editorial Note
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Varieties of Innovation: Ireland, Scotland and the Financial Revolution 1688–1720
- 2 Banking and Investment on the Periphery: The Case of Ireland
- 3 Investment from the Periphery: Irish Investors in the South Sea Company in Comparative and Transnational Perspective
- 4 ‘Most of Our Money of This Kingdom is gone over to the South Sea’: Irish Investors and the South Sea Company
- 5 ‘Nothing here but Misery’? The Economic Impact of the South Sea Bubble on Ireland
- 6 ‘A Thing They Call a Bank’: Irish Projects in the South Sea Year
- 7 The Proposals for a National Bank and the Irish Investment Community in 1720
- 8 ‘A Strong Presumption That This Bank May be a Bubble’: Misreading the Bubble and the Bank of Ireland Debates, 1721
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The Proposals for a National Bank and the Irish Investment Community in 1720
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Plates, Figures and Tables
- Editorial Note
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Varieties of Innovation: Ireland, Scotland and the Financial Revolution 1688–1720
- 2 Banking and Investment on the Periphery: The Case of Ireland
- 3 Investment from the Periphery: Irish Investors in the South Sea Company in Comparative and Transnational Perspective
- 4 ‘Most of Our Money of This Kingdom is gone over to the South Sea’: Irish Investors and the South Sea Company
- 5 ‘Nothing here but Misery’? The Economic Impact of the South Sea Bubble on Ireland
- 6 ‘A Thing They Call a Bank’: Irish Projects in the South Sea Year
- 7 The Proposals for a National Bank and the Irish Investment Community in 1720
- 8 ‘A Strong Presumption That This Bank May be a Bubble’: Misreading the Bubble and the Bank of Ireland Debates, 1721
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The various proposals for an Irish national bank in 1720–21 were ultimately unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the history of the project reveals much about both the impact of the financial revolution on Ireland and the effect of the South Sea bubble on that kingdom. Chapter 6 has shown how the various bank projects' initial fortunes rose and fell in tandem with the South Sea Company's share price. Meanwhile, chapter 8 shows how the debates about the bank, both within and without the Irish parliament in autumn 1721, were influenced and informed by alternative readings of the London and Paris bubbles. These discussions, like contemporaneous arguments in Scotland about ‘Scots projects’, demonstrated that the transnational impact of the financial revolution was as much about concepts as about the integration of money markets. The public debates about the national bank and the successive calls for subscriptions for the three competing bank schemes also, however, highlighted the presence in Ireland of a community who were prepared to invest in domestic paper credit schemes. This evidence strongly indicates that, given the opportunity to do so, these individuals would have invested in Dublin as readily as in London in 1720. This chapter examines this prospective investment community, relating their potential investments to the actual Irish holdings in the South Sea Company in London in 1720. Influenced by Ivar McGrath's analysis of Irish public creditors, and by research on the ledgers of the Company of Scotland by Douglas Watt and W. Douglas Jones, it shows how the socio-economic composition of prospective and actual public creditors on the British periphery differed from those at the metropolitan centre.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The South Sea Bubble and IrelandMoney, Banking and Investment, 1690–1721, pp. 143 - 162Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014