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
5 - ‘Nothing here but Misery’? The Economic Impact of the South Sea Bubble on Ireland
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
In autumn 1720 the South Sea bubble burst. The company's share price tumbled, falling from a high of £950 per share in mid-July to £200 by the end of September. This dramatic collapse caught the imagination of contemporaries who were eager to understand and discuss both the reasons for the rapid crash, and its impact. Such debates were, of course, heard in the coffeehouses and ‘walks’ of Exchange Alley and the Royal Exchange in London, but they were also heard elsewhere across Britain, Ireland and even further afield, as word of the stock-market crash spread. The news circulated in many ways, whether through newspapers, prints and even playing cards, or the more traditional means of private correspondence and gossip. All of these media helped to create an enduring image of the bubble as a particularly calamitous event, with William Hogarth's famous print ‘The South Sea Scheme’ with its visual echoes of the seventeenth-century plague perhaps the best known graphic portrayal. Squibs of verse meanwhile quickly appeared from the Grub Street presses, some of which came from the same pens that had previously celebrated the inflation of the bubble during the previous spring.
Like the bubble itself, these written and graphic representations were not just a London phenomenon. Prints quickly appeared in Amsterdam following the crash, while in Edinburgh the poet Allan Ramsay followed up his perceptive June 1720 poem, Wealth or the Woody: A Poem on the South Sea with two post-crash compositions, The South Sea Sang and The Rise and Fall of the Stocks.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The South Sea Bubble and IrelandMoney, Banking and Investment, 1690–1721, pp. 111 - 124Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014