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SUMMARY:What’s in a Bubble? The South Sea Bubble and the conceptual hist
 ory of financial crisis. - Dr Claire Wilkinson (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20230213T170000Z
DTEND:20230213T183000Z
UID:TALK193852@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Duncan Needham
DESCRIPTION:This paper traces the emergence of the concept of ‘bubbles
 ’ in the financial market during the early eighteenth century.  The Sout
 h Sea Bubble of 1720 was Britain’s first modern financial crisis. Differ
 ent from the Dutch Tulip Mania of the mid-1630s\, which had a limited inte
 rnational reach and few consequences for state finance\, the South Sea Bub
 ble shared many of the characteristics of the Compagnie des Indes’s Miss
 issippi Bubble (1719–20)\, thanks to the reciprocal borrowing of plans t
 o nationalise state debt and to increase nominal capital. When the phrase 
 ‘South Sea Bubble’ is used today\, it is almost always in reference to
  the dramatic rise and fall in the price South Sea Company stock. There is
  little evidence that investors engaging in the financial market at the ti
 me would have had recourse to the same vocabulary to describe a crash in t
 he market: advertisements for investments in ‘bubbles’ abound in publi
 cations from before August 1720\, and experienced investors describe placi
 ng money into explicitly named ‘bu[b]ble’ funds.\n\nIn this talk\, I w
 ill explain how the concept of a ‘bubble’ gained a foothold in the pub
 lic imaginary. Using the Cambridge Concept Lab’s ‘Shared Lexis’ tool
 \, I analyse the emergence of the phrase ‘South Sea Bubble’ in the yea
 rs after the 1720 crisis. Finally\, I argue that the conceptual framework 
 underpinning how we describe financial crisis today has its origins in the
  latency of the words used\, at the time\, to describe the interlinked cri
 ses of 1719–20.\n
LOCATION:John Bradfield Room\, Darwin College and Zoom
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