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The South Sea Bubble
The book is an economic history of the South Sea Bubble. It combines economic theory and quantitative analysis with historical evidence in order to provide a rounded account. It brings together scholarship from a variety of different fields to update the existing historical work on the Bubble. Up until now, economic history research has not been integrated into mainstream histories of 1720. Technical work on share prices and ledgers has been inaccessible to a wider audience. As well as providing new evidence against the gambling mania argument, the book also interprets the existing economic history scholarship for non-specialists.
Helen Paul is Research Fellow in Economics at the University of Southampton, UK.
1. Introduction 2. The history of the South Sea Company 3. The functioning of the market 4. Investment in the South Sea Company 5. The Aftermath 6. Conclusion
eBook
PARTY CONNECTIONS, INTEREST GROUPS AND THE SLOW DIFFUSION OF INFRASTRUCTURE: EVIDENCE FROM BRITAIN'S FIRST TRANSPORT REVOLUTION
Economic and political interests often block or delay infrastructure improvements. This article examines their effects by studying Britain's river navigation improvements in the early 1700s - a subject of intense lobbying in parliament. It shows that stronger party connections and influence in neighbouring areas likely to oppose or support projects affected whether a town got a river navigation act. Their estimated effects are comparable to geography and town economic characteristics in magnitude and help explain whether towns were blocked from getting navigation improvements. The findings address institutions following the Glorious Revolution and broader issues concerning infrastructure, technology diffusion and political connections.
Journal Article
The First Crash
For nearly three centuries the spectacular rise and fall of the South Sea Company has gripped the public imagination as the most graphic warning to investors of the dangers of unbridled speculation. Yet history repeats itself and the same elemental forces that drove up the price of South Sea shares to dizzying heights in 1720 have in recent years produced the global crash of 1987, the Japanese stock market bubble of the 1980s/90s, and the international dot.com boom of the 1990s.
The First Crash throws light on the current debate about investor rationality by re-examining the story of the South Sea Bubble from the standpoint of investors and commentators during and preceding the fateful Bubble year. In absorbing prose, Richard Dale describes the trading techniques of London's Exchange Alley (which included 'modern' transactions such as derivatives) and uses new data, as well as the hitherto neglected writings of a brilliant contemporary financial analyst, to show how investors lost their bearings during the Bubble period in much the same way as during the dot.com boom.
The events of 1720, as presented here, offer insights into the nature of financial markets that, being independent of place and time, deserve to be considered by today's investors everywhere. This book is therefore aimed at all those with an interest in the behavior of stock markets.
eBook
Why England? Demographic Factors, Structural Change and Physical Capital Accumulation during the Industrial Revolution
Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor and Weil (2000, American Economic Review, 89, 806-828) and Galor and Moav (2002, Quartely Journal of Economics, 777(4), 1133-1191) captures the key features of the transition from Stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why industrialization occurred much earlier in some parts of the world than in others. To answer this question, we present a probabilistic two-sector model where the initial escape from Malthusian constraints depends on the demographic regime, capital deepening and the use of more differentiated capital equipment. Weather-induced shocks to agricultural productivity cause changes in prices and quantities, and affect wages. In a Standard model with capital externalities, these fluctuations interact with the demographic regime and affect the speed of growth. Our model is calibrated to match the main characteristics of the English economy in 1700 and the observed transition until 1850. We capture one of the key features of the British Industrial Revolution emphasized by economic historians -- slow growth of Output and productivity. Fertility limitation is responsible for higher per capita incomes, and these in turn increase industrialization probabilities. The paper also explores the availability of nutrition for poorer segments of society. We examine the influence of redistributive institutions such as the Old Poor Law, and find they were not decisive in fostering industrialization. Simulations using parameter values for other countries show that Britain's early escape was only partly due to chance. France could have moved out of agriculture and into manufacturing faster than Britain, but the probability was less than 25%. Contrary to recent Claims in the literature, 18th Century China had only a minimal chance to escape from Malthusian constraints.
Journal Article
Colonies, copper, and the market for inventive activity in England and Wales, 1680-1730
Between 1680 and 1730 the English and Welsh copper industry rose from the dead and by the mid-eighteenth century it had become Europe's leading copper producer. The revival followed the extension of sugar cultivation in England's colonies and the creation of a strong new demand for copper, which was reflected in rising exports and rising prices. Buoyant demand created a favourable market for the inventive activity needed to cut costs in the native industry, which encouraged investment in a systematic programme of research and development and culminated in important breakthroughs in smelting and mining technologies which transformed the non-ferrous metal industries. The story provides an insight into how the economic context shaped the way useful knowledge was produced and consumed. Colonial expansion not only provided England with additional resources overseas but also encouraged the reallocation of human and financial capital to make better use of slack resources at home. Empire and technical change intersected with positive consequences for economic growth.
Journal Article
“Legitimate commerce” in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England Under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726
Following the loss in 1712 of its previous monopoly over British trade with West Africa, the Royal African Company found itself unable to compete with smaller, lower-cost British slave traders and nearly collapsed entirely. Salvation seemed to arrive in 1720 in the person of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos, who led a massive re-capitalization of the company and made the strategic decision to move its focus to the commodity trade between Europe and Africa and on the search for new botanical and mineral resources in Africa itself. While Chandos directed the RAC’s employees in implementing this radical new scheme, he kept it secret from his fellow shareholders, leading them to believe that his plans were aimed at revitalizing the company’s mature but declining line of business in the transatlantic slave trade. The Duke’s strategy, however, proved overly ambitious and failed to reverse the company’s decline.
Journal Article
Did Turnpike Trusts Increase Transportation Investment in Eighteenth-Century England?
Turnpike trusts were private organizations that financed road improvements by levying tolls and issuing mortgage debt. They were established by Acts of Parliament throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. The acts transferred authority from parishes to a body of trustees, composed of local landowners and merchants. Parishes financed road improvements with local property taxes; but they could not levy tolls. This article uses a new data set to show that turnpike trusts increased road expenditure, rather than replacing existing or forthcoming parish expenditure. It also illustrates how institutional changes contributed to the process of economic development in England.
Journal Article
'Veritable gold mines before the arrival of railway competition': but did dividends signal rates of return in the English canal industry?
Dividends can provide a tangible signal of earnings, but this function depends upon characteristics of financial reporting that were not always present in early financial capitalism. Although eighteenth-century English canal companies offered low-risk securitized capital approved by Parliament and were important to the development of financial capitalism, little is known about the economic state of the canal industry, beyond observed dividend levels. This article estimates rates of return on equity for a set of major English canals, but shows that their financial reporting under-represented equity inputs so that dividend rates did not reliably signal operating returns of equity-based rates of return.
Journal Article
The transition to financial capitalism and its implications for financial reporting
There are two main alternative explanations in the literature for the patterns of financial reporting during the period of the British Industrial Revolution (BIR). Rob Bryer sees the new social relations of production in which manufacturing entrepreneurs strove to increase the productivity of wage-labour as leading to a distinct capitalist \"calculative mentality\", focused on the return on capital employed; Dick Edwards argues from agency precepts that financial reporting emerged with the transition from \"industrial\" to \"financial capitalism\". This paper aims to reappraise these theorisations using new archival evidence. Canals, the crucial transport network during the BIR, were owned by limited liability companies financed by outside investors, with clear separation of ownership and control, yet were not capitalist in Bryer's sense because their profits came from a form of rent (tolls on freight) not from the exploitation of wage-labour. The paper reviews the financial statements of seven major English canals from the 1770s to the 1850s, and uses these findings as a basis for appraising the above-mentioned theories. The financial statements of English canal companies do not distinguish profit or enable users to calculate rates of return on capital employed and so assess the performance of management. This sharply conflicts with agency theory but is consistent with Bryer's thesis. The paper contributes to the authors' understanding of how and why corporate financial reporting emerged, and the relationship between this process and the transition to the capitalist mode of production. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article