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
1 - Varieties of Innovation: Ireland, Scotland and the Financial Revolution 1688–1720
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 period between the Glorious Revolution and the South Sea bubble has long been recognized as a particularly significant period in British and Irish financial history. This was the age of the ‘financial revolution’. This revolution has traditionally been understood to encompass the series of English financial innovations in the period immediately after the constitutional and political revolution of 1688–89. These included the creation of a national debt, the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the development of a sophisticated system of war financing, all of which enabled William III to continue his continental military conflict with Louis XIV's France following William's ascent to the English, Scottish and Irish thrones. The same period also saw the rise of joint-stock trading companies and the emergence of the London stock exchange as an important financial centre. Rapid developments were also visible in private banking, with a concomitant spread of paper money and bills of exchange as a circulating medium. Cumulatively, these innovations comprised a revolution and have been seen as laying the foundations of modern capitalism.
The fusion of these financial innovations with an increasing centralized and efficient state bureaucracy has led historians, notably John Brewer, to describe the emergence of an English, and after 1707 a British, fiscal-military state. The English/British state's growing ability to mobilize its financial resources, and to develop more efficient and reliable forms of war financing, were crucial to its emergence as a great power in the first half of the eighteenth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The South Sea Bubble and IrelandMoney, Banking and Investment, 1690–1721, pp. 19 - 42Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014