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2 - The Crisis of 1720 and the Invention of Discredit

from Part I - Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2022

Trevor Jackson
Affiliation:
George Washington University, Washington DC
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Summary

The year 1720 witnessed the world’s first international financial crisis. Instead of retelling the standard narrative that focuses on John Law and his System, this chapter uses the records of the stock speculator James Brydges during the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles to illustrate the different capacity for impunity in the 1720 crisis. Changes in impunity were due to the expansion in the complexity of finance, and the fraught process of trying to establish central banks as the main institutional form of immune actors in that new complex financial world. The financial bubbles of 1720 were connected by flows of capital, information, and personnel, which were beyond the capacity of either the French or the British government to regulate. For the first time, financial instruments and techniques existed, which were beyond the understanding of the educated amateur and were powerful enough to provoke wide-ranging economic disorder.

Type
Chapter
Information
Impunity and Capitalism
The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830
, pp. 63 - 103
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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