The Center for Early Modern History invites us to join the fall lecture series, Panic and Plague in 1720 & 2020: The View from Minnesota. In 1720, the Mississippi Company, a project of financial speculation in the Mississippi River region, collapsed. The explosion of this financial bubble coincided and was entangled with the last mass outbreak... Continue Reading →

Volume 54, Number 1, Fall 2020 Special Issue: The South Sea Bubble, Mississippi Bubble, and Financial Revolution Eighteenth-Century Studies is committed to publishing the best of current writing on all aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The journal publishes different modes of analysis and disciplinary discourses that explore how recent historiographical, critical, and theoretical ideas have engaged scholars... Continue Reading →

Paris, 1720. Throngs of frenzied speculators gather on rue Quincampoix, seduced by the promise of spectacular wealth awaiting investors in the Compagnie des Indes. The manic trade in stock shares fuels an unprecedented bull market that culminates in the world’s first international financial disaster: the collapse of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, named after... Continue Reading →