Shared by Lisa Marie Griffith
The South Sea company was an English company which, in 1720, was granted a monopoly to trade with South America. In return for the monopoly the company lent £7 million to the English government and underwrote the national debt (which then stood at £30 million) for an interest rate of 5 per cent per annum. Demand for stock in the company grew overnight and conditions all of a sudden became ripe for one of the most famous bubbles in English history. Clearly the English had learnt nothing from the Dutch and their fanaticism for Tulips!
I came across this Rory Bremner clip the other day while looking for some material relating to early modern financial bubbles to show a class and thought I would share it. Not that we need an explanation of what a bubble is these days but I thought this explained it very well in the context of the early eighteenth century.
The first of TG4′s new series ‘Rapairi’, an examination of Irish outlaws from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, aired last night. The opening show made ambitious claims. The show aims to look at 6 outlaws, tories and raparees as they were referred to in the proclamations of the day, their lives and to establish the reality behind the folklore. It also aims to examine why Irish people are disrespectful to the law. As a social historian of the eighteenth century I have often come across ‘tories and raparees’ in my research. These are men who are on the run, have skipped a court hearing, have escaped from jail and who are known and wanted criminals. Many of these men went into hiding, escaped to rural Ireland and lived like bandits and the term basically described villains and criminals. TG4, however, chose to focus on the raparee heroes of early modern Ireland- gentlemen who had been pushed outside the law because of some injustice that they had suffered.
Consider this. You’ve come up with a brilliant idea for a mini series on the British grand tourists who travelled through early modern Europe, the places they visited, the foods they tasted, the ideas they borrowed, the things they saw. The second of four instalments details the link between the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire and the architecture of early modern Florence and Rome. In the corners of these majestic cities it uncovers the influences borrowed by the architect Christopher Wren in the construction of St Paul’s Cathedral, the greatest monument to his elaborate and uncompleted plans to transform and rejuvenate a devastated London.
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