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This article contends that common representations of the history of the British economy and economic policy in the 'Golden Age' period (circa 1950–73) as a story of 'failure' rely overwhelmingly on one measure, that of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. Drawing on the foundational criticisms of this metric made by Simon Kuznets, it is argued that, for this period of British economic history, shortfalls in measured GDP growth in comparison with other rich countries are a very poor measure of changes in economic well-being in the UK. If we follow this argument and discard the belief that one metric can summarize trends in such well-being, the notion of 'failure' in this period should be set aside in favour of a more nuanced, multidimensional assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of British anthropology and critiques a new book called "Participant Observers" by Freddy Foks. The author argues that Foks misrepresents the existing scholarship and fails to situate his findings within the larger historiographic narrative of British anthropology. However, the article also acknowledges that Foks' book provides valuable insights into the impact of social anthropology on British society in the twentieth century. The book covers topics such as expertise, race, economics, and kinship and community. Despite its flaws, the article suggests that the book is worth reading for those interested in modern British history, identity formation, empire, race studies, or anthropological legacies. [Extracted from the article]

Britain is rarely considered an exemplar of 'state capitalism'. In contrast, we argue that Britain should be treated as the prototype project of state capitalism in the world economic system, the primary contribution of our paper been to outline the parameters of state capitalism in Britain across two historical periods. Turning the conceptual lens of state capitalism towards Britain raises some challenging issues for the wider literature. Recent scholarship has started to consider greater diversity in regimes of state capitalism and moved beyond the typical nation-state geographical imaginary of state capitalism. Similarly, our paper seeks to introduce a new spatiality to state capitalism with deeper sensitivity to multi-scalar relations. State capitalism in Britain has rarely been bound to the geographical limitations of the nation-state; instead, it has been a transnational project, centred variably on empire, Europe, and the global market – with industrial policy tailored to enable the British economy to exploit and/or service these various spaces by 'making markets'. We emphasize the often-financialized nature of this industrial policy intervention arguing it is constitutive of a 'financial state capitalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing historiography on relations between Britain and the states of Lower Gulf after British withdrawal from 'East of Suez' in 1971 suggests that the former imperial power successfully established an informal role in the 1970s and beyond which amounted to empire in all but name. While Britain certainly sought to retain as much of its influence and as many of its interests in the economically important Lower Gulf as possible, an analysis of Anglo-Qatari relations after 1971 demonstrates that Britain's former exclusive position was substantially eroded. British economic weakness, fierce competition from Britain's industrial rivals, and the encroachment of the Arab world into the affairs of Qatar all militated still further against the preservation of British influence and interests, let alone the establishment of an informal imperial relationship with Qatar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses romantic literary studies has much to learn from recent scholarship in economic history. Topics discussed including ways to understand the connections between Romantic literary and cultural formations; Britain's social and demographic conditions, its technological development, and its colonial, mercantile, and ecological relations; and economic transformation in British Romantic writings.

In contrast to the way economic history is often presented, our aim is to provide a concise coverage of economic growth in the UK in four short essays that are written for a general audience of non-economists. In this first essay, we explore the drastic change Britain underwent in the mid-18th century, as agriculture and traditional production methods began to mechanise, increasing productivity to exceed the limits of the land and human strength. For the first time, people witnessed increases in the standard of living within a generation as national wealth soared. It ended centuries of subsistence living in which growth was negligible. As the 19th century dawned, Britain welcomed the steam era, an ignition of modernity, transforming travel, trade and production. We shed light on the wider repercussions of Britain's economic dominance, highlighting the consequences of rapid urbanisation and assessing the implications of the era of Imperial strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eve Worth's study of the post-war generation of women who, she argues, self-define as daughters of the welfare state, adds another layer to the conversation, placing the welfare state at the heart of her interpretation of social mobility and class across the life course of women born between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. In autobiographies and oral histories, the value that access to secondary and tertiary education conferred on this generation of women operates as a common denominator, at least for those who made it, who stepped out of their social class. The welfare state generation: women, agency and class in Britain since 1945: Eve Worth London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, x+264 pp., £85 (hbk), ISBN 978 1 35019 206 5, 9781350192072 (ePDF) (£76.50), 9781350192089 (ebk) (£76.50). [Extracted from the article]

This article constructs Malaya economic historiography during the inter-war years with a focus on the Federated Malay States (FMS). As a major supplier of raw materials for the British empire, the FMS' position often caught the attention of the British government and the Colonial Office. However, the imperial economic historiography during the inter-war years always focused on the Dominion without involving protectorate, especially the FMS. This limitation caused the FMS' economic development seems not influenced by the imperial economic policy. Accordingly, the Malaya economic history often bound with a laissez-faire framework, while there was a resurrection of neomercantilism in Britain after the First World War. Thus, this article proved the influence of neomercantilism in the FMS' colonial economic structure. It focused on the colonial practice of imperial economic policy formulated since the Imperial Conference of 1926. The history research methodology used to identify the mercantile system in the FMS by analysing prime sources such as CO 273, 717, 885, CAB 24, T176 and the FMS' colonial administration documents. The study found that, since 1920s, the imperial economic policy influenced by Chamberlainite policy, which is associated with neomercantilism. The imperial preference, inter-empire trade development and tropical product development are the neomercantilism policies practised in the FMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elizabeth I is regarded as having been parsimonious in creating new noblemen, allowing the nobility to decrease in size as she sought to maintain the exclusivity of the caste. In reality, the queen created a larger nobility than her Tudor predecessors had done. Her failure to sustain this high number was due not to a policy of limiting the number of noblemen but rather because she did not need so many. Elizabeth had a policy of economy with regard to both creating and using noblemen as she maintained a nobility appropriate for the circumstances of the time, as assessed by her and Lord Burghley. Early Elizabethan peerages honoured her family and restored old titles. Later the choice of candidates was influenced by Burghley's need for more noblemen in parliament and in the counties. However, although Burghley proposed candidates, it was Elizabeth's decision whether to follow his advice and in 1589 she chose to do otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction impacted political reform in Great Britain during the 1860s. It discusses liberalism in British politics, perceived messages about liberty, self-determination, and constitutional government sent from the U.S. to Great Britain, and radicalism in Great Britain. The article also discusses reaction to the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation issued by then-U.S. president Abraham Lincoln and economic conditions in Bradford, Yorkshire.

Heavy geographic patterning to the 2016 Brexit vote in UK and Trump vote in US has resulted in numerous ecological analyses of variations in area-level voting behaviours. We extend this work by employing modelling approaches that permit regionally-specific associations between outcome and explanatory variables. We do so by generating a large number of regional models using penalised regression for variable selection and coefficient evaluation. The results reinforce those already published in that we find associations in support of a 'left-behind' reading. Multivariate models are dominated by a single variable—levels of degree-education. Net of this effect, 'secondary' variables help explain the vote, but do so differently for different regions. For Brexit, variables relating to material disadvantage, and to a lesser extent structural-economic circumstances, are more important for regions with a strong industrial history than for regions that do not share such a history. For Trump, increased material disadvantage reduces the vote both in global models and models built mostly for Southern states, thereby undermining the 'left-behind' reading. The reverse is nevertheless true for many other states, particularly those in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, where comparatively high levels of disadvantage assist the Trump vote and where model outputs are more consistent with the UK, especially so for regions with closer economic histories. This pattern of associations is exposed via our regional modelling approach, application of penalised regression and use of carefully designed visualization to reason over 100+ model outputs located within their spatial context. Our analysis, documented in an accompanying github repository, is in response to recent calls in empirical Social and Political Science for fuller exploration of subnational contexts that are often controlled out of analyses, for use of modelling techniques more robust to replication and for greater transparency in research design and methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have long recognized the prominent role women played in vending food and fuel on the streets of early modern towns, but huckstering was a profitable part-time trade that attracted men as well as women. Indeed, there were probably more male than female hucksters operating in Southampton and other towns. While many scholars have been skeptical of the commercial opportunities open to street traders, hucksters, far from being under the thumb of exploitive suppliers, were sharp and independent, and adept at using their status as wholesale buyers to obtain goods at discount and sell them for profit. As an analysis of the presentments of Southampton's court leet shows, not only was huckstering a difficult commerce to constrain, but town authorities were loath to deny wives and widows one of the few trades they could practice in order to support themselves and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on government debt going back to the early 1700s. It mentions that British state's ongoing coupon payments on the Slavery Abolition Act bonds, the retraction of the treasury's announcement, and the subsequent policy of "no comment" are tangible artifacts of the British state's disavowal of slavery's legacies in its postimperial and postemancipation present.

The article offers information related to the author's conversation with British professor, Stuart Hall. Topics discussed include social and economic conditions of migrants in Great Britain; efforts of migrants to deal with anxieties caused by unfettered migration through legislation; and hostile environment for migrants.

Structural transformation is a key indicator of economic development. We present the first time series of male labor sectoral shares for England and Wales before 1800, using a large sample of probate and apprenticeship data to produce national- and county-level estimates. England experienced a rapid decline in the share of workers in agriculture between the early seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, associated with rising agricultural and especially industrial productivity; Wales saw few changes. Our results show that England experienced unusually early structural change and highlight the mid-seventeenth century as a turning point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With his latest major contribution to the understanding of the link between maritime power and British strategy in the First World War, Nicholas Lambert consolidates a number of things. Lambert has reconstructed the global wheat crisis that gripped the entire world and in particular Great Britain's war effort in late 1914 and early 1915. The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How Globalized Trade led Britain to its Worst Defeat of the First World War: by Nicholas A. Lambert, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, 280 pp., £32.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-754520-1. [Extracted from the article]

In the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small country on the periphery of Europe with an economy less advanced than those of several of its continental neighbors. In 1851, the Great Exhibition both symbolized and displayed the technological and economic lead that Britain had then taken. A half-century later, however, there were only minor differences between the leading economies of Western Europe. To gain insight into both the long period during which Britain outpaced its neighbors and the decades when its lead evaporated, it is illuminating to focus on the energy supply. Energy is expended in all productive activities. The contrast between the limitations inherent to organic economies dependent on the annual round of plant photosynthesis for energy and the possibilities open to an economy able to make effective use of the vast quantity of energy available in coal measures is key both to the understanding of the lengthy period of Britain’s relative success and to its subsequent swift decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Allen characterized the region of Strasbourg in France in the period before 1789 as exceptionally poor. New evidence suggests, however, that Allen underestimated wage levels because of a failure to include payments in-kind and to clarify the differences between skilled and unskilled workers. Moreover, his wages came from a region that is wider than Strasbourg per se. The use of wage data for the agricultural sector that were higher in nominal terms than Allen’s, with reference to regions like Paris and southern England, elevates the economic standing of Strasbourg and, by extension, that of France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the financial status of Cassandra Austen, mother of the English author Jane Austen, after she was widowed. It mentions the income she received from investments and her widow's portion, financial support from her sons, and the error that has persisted as to what her income was.

The article examines the local and regional economic impacts of NHS spending. The research is set in the context of tensions between buying economies, process efficiencies and local economic development impacts of public sector procurement, and contributes to the evidence base on supplier proximity and income retention at the local and regional level. The scale, scope and spatial distribution of NHS spending in a South Wales case are analysed using detailed purchasing information provided by a local health board. The article then uses an economic modelling framework to quantify the supply chain impacts of this spending to determine the full regional economic impacts of operational and capital expenditures. The analysis shows that NHS Wales spending supports significant levels of regional economic activity in terms of output, employment and gross value-added. The article also explores scenarios on the potential economic significance of import substitution of selected purchases. The implications of the changing procurement environment, with new EU directives, and a reorganisation of procurement functions within NHS Wales, are explored, and suggestions are made for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the shift in the economic direction in the 20th century in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the divisive changes in economic direction, corporatist interventions to stimulate aggregate demand, the Conservative Party's adaptation to the post-1945 mixed economy, related elements of economic management that influenced changes in economic direction after 1979 and a case study of the Scottish coalfields to show the changes in economic direction in the 1940s and 1980s.

This article offers a comparative analysis of the British national election in 1945 and the Australian federal election in 1946. Both elections resulted in Labour victories. Through an in-depth analysis of these election campaigns, the study aims to identify similarities and differences in the form of ideological appeals, and especially in the deployment of the languages of 'class' and 'nation'. It thereby seeks to shed new light on the changing form of electoral appeals, the nature of post-war Labour ideology, and the contribution of both of these to Labour's political success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the appearance of counterfeit coinage in the British colonies. She mentions the different kinds of counterfeit coins, their production by Rhode Island merchants, and their impact on the economic state of the Greater Antilles, particularly Jamaica.

This paper focuses on the spatial imprint and social impacts of the emerging geographies of concentrated overseas investment into London’s high-end real estate market, particularly the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. Framed by literatures on the 1% and the super-rich, and based on a mixed methodological approach of qualitative interviews with intermediaries and a quantitative mapping of overseas investors using 2011 census data, the results speak to the pervasive nature of “safe-haven” seeking in London real estate and its attendant transnational provenance set within a laissez-faire regulatory framework. In so doing, it makes an important contribution to the geographies of the super-rich, the class geographies of London, and the broader sense that overseas investors are producing what we call “pied-à-terre” urbanism which builds on a conventional gentrification framework (exclusionary displacement and a more affluent incoming group) but also exceeds it in several ways, leading to an increasingly socially attenuated landscape. This exceeding relates to: a different kind of rent gap, in that it is not speculative but safe-haven seeking, a guaranteed return on investment, and occurs without previous disinvestment; the agents are not traditional gentrifiers; the transnational nature of the process, with no attachment to particular places like in the traditional gentrification model; and a process focused on super-prime areas and completely independent of the existing gentrification process in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use annual information on apprenticeships in England between 1710–1805 to estimate the dynamic supply-responsiveness in this market in the presence of the increasingly powerful technological shocks as the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace. Using both an Instrumental Variable method and a dynamic Vector Autoregression framework (VAR) system to identify the long-run response functions, we find evidence of an elastic supply, sufficiently high as to allow quantities to rise considerably in response to demand shocks. This finding lends support to the view that Britain's apprenticeship institution was the source of its advantage in skilled mechanical labor, so critical to its economic success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Iain Duncan Smith resigned as the UK's Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in March 2016. While not invisible from the debate following his resignation, the fact that changes to social security policy for disabled people were central to Duncan Smith's time as Secretary of State and central to his (at least public) reasons for resignation was lost in a focus on the internal machinations of the UK's Conservative Party. In this short article, Duncan Smith's resignation is used to examine the location of additional cost social security benefits for disabled people in Conservative thinking in contemporary Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a method using consensual budget standards to estimate additional costs incurred by households that include disabled people with specified impairments. The article reports on a first application of this to UK single adults with sensory impairments. Using the Minimum Income Standard method, the research aims to identify the cost of disability by working with groups of disabled people to agree what additions to minimum budgets for non-disabled people are required for someone with a given impairment. This provides a more tangible account of the cost of disability than economic analysis of living standards achieved by disabled and non-disabled people, and adds to surveys of actual spending on additional items, which do not account for unmet need. The research on vision and hearing impairment yields new insights into costs arising from the way disabled people live their everyday lives, not just from spending on adaptations and equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of businesses established by migrants to the UK traditionally stressed co-ethnic relationships as economic resources. More recent work identifies a new ethnic economy characterized by migrants’ common experiences, with ethnicity playing less of a role. The present study complements this newer perspective through investigation of the experiences of forty-nine business owners and sixty of their workers in the West Midlands. Economic relationships were central to the operation of migrant firms, and a minority of firms escaped from sectors traditionally dominated by migrant firms. Yet substantial continuity was also evident, including exclusion from the mainstream on ethnic lines and relations with workers characterized by informality. Migrant business is evolving but it retains many of its features; this pattern can be explained by combining the mixed embeddedness theory of the enterprise with labour process analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the proposal to increase economic growth in the north of England through an initiative known as the Northern Powerhouse. Topics include how the Northern Powerhouse proposal aims to shift some of the economic focus away from London, England and discusses the benefits of the proposal for cities like Manchester, England.

The economic development of the West is under examined in terms of lessons there may be for development strategies employed in the global South today. This article examines the emergence of sustained change in economic growth in Britain in the 19th century, in light of the normative poverty eradication strategies of today. The article focuses not so much on what happened in Britain and why, as on what did not happen during this period of rapid economic development. The purpose of this anachronistic examination is to search for helpful correctives to current poverty eradication thinking and practice. There are two major lessons. First, Britain’s experience of rapid economic growth suggests that social change is unpredictable and thus immune to today’s linear planning models. Second, Britain’s development is a story of changes in the individual and social identity of the British people themselves – the British people changed. A set of proposals in response to these findings is then described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the future of Great Britain's relation with Europe and its effects on world's diplomatic relations. Topics discussed include problems of making common rules for free access to European market and shifting powers from West to East with focus on keeping Great Britain with the EU even when Western countries are facing crisis like Germany.

In the first UK budget by a Conservative Government for 18 years, £13 billion per annum savings in social security spending by 2020/21 were announced. Of these, 4.9% (£640 million per annum, and up to £900 million in the years after 2020) is to come from the withdrawal from April 2017 of the work-related component of the Employment and Support Allowance. This means that new claimants will be worse off by £29.05 per week (2015/16 figures) than would have been the case had the measure not been introduced. This brief commentary critically analyses this development as the extension of an ideological assault upon the out-of-work benefits for disabled people which has been gathering momentum for about a decade in the hope of forcing such people into competing for wage work in the open market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the relationship between political authority and commercial power in the British colony of Senegambia in West Africa. Emphasis is given to topics such as the management of trade within the British Empire, political stability, and the organization of labor under colonial administration. Other topics include the appointment of royal governor Charles O'Hara and the role of the slave trade.

This paper presents a history of aggregate demand and supply shocks spanning 1900 – 2016 for the United Kingdom. Sign restrictions derived from a workhorse Keynesian model are used to identify the signs of those shocks. We compare the 30 largest shocks implied by a vector autoregressive model in unemployment and inflation with the narrative historical record. Our approach provides a new perspective on well-known events in economic history. We highlight two episodes of particular interest: an aggregate supply shock in the late 1920s, which we attribute to changes in the bargaining power of labor, and positive aggregate demand shocks in the mid-1970s, which we attribute to fiscal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisans often perceive real world conditions in a manner that credits their own party. Yet recent findings suggest that partisans are capable of setting their loyalties aside when confronted with clear evidence, for example, during an economic crisis. This study examines a different possibility. While partisans may acknowledge the same reality, they may find other ways of aligning undeniable realities with their party loyalties. Using monthly survey data collected before and after the unexpected collapse of the British national economy (2004-10), this study presents one key finding: As partisans came to agree that economic conditions had gotten much worse, they conversely polarized in whether they thought the government was responsible. While the most committed partisans were surprisingly apt in acknowledging the economic collapse, they were also the most eager to attribute responsibility selectively. For that substantial share of the electorate, partisan-motivated reasoning seems highly adaptive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is designed to return to "basics" by interrogating the estimates and proxies utilized by participants in the Great Divergence debate by placing them in a "nutritional perspective" to ascertain whether and to what extent there was a common trajectory between the Yangtze Delta and England after 1600 for (1) a sustainable intake of food and (2) support of an increasingly urbanized, commercialized, and industrialized economy. Our survey, critique, and recalibration of the data produced for this particular and altogether more promising line of historical enquiry rejects inference-derived statistical evidence that continues to be widely cited to support the revisionist claims of the California School. Recalibrated and tabulated here into kilocalories for purposes of reciprocal comparisons, that evidence suggests that although the population of early modern Jiangnan enjoyed "nutritional security," its standard of living was declining and falling to levels below standards afflicting England's laboring poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British exit from the European Union would be a long, difficult and conflictual process. Greek exit from the euro would centre on a short, punctuated crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by a manuscript find in the Macclesfield Collection held by Cambridge University Library, the role of mathematicians in the emerging life insurance industry in eighteenth-century England is examined. Two early life insurance societies are examined here in detail. In one, a prominent mathematician's arguments were ignored thus confirming the generally accepted view among historians of insurance that the role of mathematicians at this time was minor or non-existent. For the other case, the promoter of two insurance schemes used his mathematical knowledge to design the operation of his insurance plans thus showing that mathematical activity was at least not non-existent. The manuscript find still leaves the question of what the motivation and impact was of the major writers on life annuities during the first half of the eighteenth century. This is addressed by considering the major economic background of early eighteenth-century England—land and property. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advocates of the 'borderless world' thesis suggest that migrant workers can benefit from employment opportunities available everywhere, with workers simply migrating towards these opportunities. However, as global inequalities widen and potential global mobilities develop, states are 'managing' migration. Individual migrant 'agency', its structuration, and the subsequent experiences of migrants and employers, can restrict such mobility. Consequently, there is a need to describe and problematize the new strategies. This article considers these issues with reference to the emerging impact of the migrant cap on non-European Economic Area ( EEA) migrants to the United Kingdom ( UK). It explores the links between immigration and employment rights and the implications for migrant mobility. Policies of 'managed migration' frequently do not take into account issues of geography and intra and inter regional competition for migrants by employers operating in sectors with skill shortages, or differential migrant 'agency' in the form of their skills and attributes. This may impinge on the effectiveness of such approaches and on economic prosperity at a national, regional and local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of the post-secular city by examining the growing presence of Street-Pastors in the night-time economy of British cities. Street-Pastors are Christian volunteers who work to ensure the safety of people on a ‘night out’. We contribute to work that has called for greater attention to be placed on the ways in which religious faith and ethics are performed to create liminal spaces of understanding in urban areas. Drawing upon in-depth ethnographic research conducted in a range of UK towns and cities, we consider this distinct form of faith-based patrolling in relation to the spatial processes and practices of urban-nightscapes. By exploring the geographies of Street-Pastors, we not only contribute to more nuanced accounts of ‘drinking spaces’ but provide an empirical engagement with the growing body of work on urban rhythms and encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research Highlights and Abstract This article focuses on the banking crisis in the US and UK., It is essential to understand banker agency and the institutional and structural contexts which shaped such agency., Bankers experienced variegated patters of constraint and opportunity. At one level institutional theories that emphasise institutional constraint cannot easily account for the authority and agency enjoyed by key bankers., On the other hand, bankers were heavily influenced by institutional change in the shape of market 'liberalisation', which produced intense levels of competition and pressures to achieve higher profit returns: an exacting form of market discipline., Bankers and financiers in the US and UK modified institutions and revolutionised the banking industry prior to the 2007-8 crisis. These agents were however heavily constrained and eventually overwhelmed by institutional pressures and wider structural forces that encouraged high-risk leveraged trading and which generated systemic risk. To account for this, institutional theory needs to incorporate a broader canvas of conditioning contexts, particularly the impact of structural or systemic forces on agents and the way in which these are actualised as a form of 'ecosystem power'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Irish participation in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, a British stock market bubble involving the South Sea Company. Particular focus is given to the roles of Irish residents of London, England in arranging and managing Irish investments in the company. According to the author, their activities can illuminate Irish participation in the British financial revolution as a whole. Business networks and the impact of Irish investments on local economies are also discussed.