(suspenseful music)
- The 1700s was a period of all sorts
of innovation, new thinking.
It was a period called the Enlightenment.
The European states were
in constant state of war
in this 18th century,
fighting with each other,
but also pushing out into
the rest of the world
and developing colonial economic systems
that eventually turned
into something called
the Atlantic trade, which
was based fundamentally
on the plantation system and slavery.
One component of all of this was finance
and the need to of states
to finance their wars,
the needs of entrepreneurs to finance
new inventions and discoveries,
the needs of cities to
create infrastructure.
All of those things demanded capital.
1720 was an amazing year
for all sorts of things,
but particularly for the first
great stock market bubble,
and it occurred all throughout Europe,
at least in three markets and probably
in another dozen in small ways.
The stated purpose of
the book was to serve
as a memory of mankind's greatest folly.
And every time some
bubble happened later on
in financial history, people
would turn back to this book
and say, "Oh my gosh,
it's happened again."
but, I'll jump to some of
the pictures at the time.
Here's a picture of what
the actual stock market
trading looked like in the 18th century.
You've got a stock
exchange in this picture
that is a courtyard, and people are,
all the stock traders are
organized around this courtyard.
And we have a list of the
things that they're trading in.
So, this list includes things
like the South Sea Company,
and this bubble has been
called the South Sea bubble.
Then, it includes things
like coffee and cocoa,
because this was also a period
when people were
speculating in commodities
that were coming from the New World.
So, coffee and cocoa were being grown
in plantations in South America,
and there was great conflict
about whether France
or Holland or England would be able
to control the trade in
these sort of luxury items.
So, here's a picture of the place
that the stock market craze really began
and it's a picture of the street,
one street in Paris,
called the Rue Quincampoix.
And it's a rather narrow street.
You can still go visit it.
But, what this picture shows
is a huge crowd of people,
all of them trading stock certificates.
And people leaning out the
windows calling to each other.
And a picture of John
Law, who was the person
that had this idea for
a big trading company
to explore and colonize
the whole territory
of Louisiana in North America.
So, this picture shows the
craze about people thinking
that the trade in North America is going
to make France incredibly wealthy.
And they got shares in this deal,
and they're going to make
a lot of money from it.
Here's a picture that was
used to promote the idea
that Mississippi trade was
going to be profitable.
Believe it or not, this
is a picture of Louisiana.
You wouldn't know it because
it's full of mountains.
And it shows trade between
the Native Americans
and the French explorers.
And so, it goes on to describe
all these wonderful things
that Louisiana must have in it,
the potential for mines
and farms and plantations
and the wonderful weather and
all sorts of stuff like that.
So, there was a lot of propaganda about
what the trade in the New
World could bring you.
Here's a picture that kind of shows
how the artist describes
the bubble and crash.
(low-key music)
In this picture, you've got a cliff
that's extending out to the right.
You've got people doing all
sorts of foolish things.
You've got people chasing a cart,
and they're going like
lemmings up this cliff,
and they're being led over the cliff
by the goddess of fortune.
So, they're all chasing the fortune.
They're going up this cliff,
and then they're falling off.
The images have so much detail in them
that you have to keep
going back again and again
and again and studying them.
So, even a single image, like the image
of this stock exchange,
you know, when you look at,
you go, "Well, yeah, that's a lot
"of stock brokers going and trading."
But then, every single
one of the pieces of paper
has a little joke on it that
has to do with the company.
The way that people looked
at images in the 18th century
is quite different than the
way we look at images now.
When we go to Instagram, we consume lots
and lots of interesting pictures.
And the Instagram images are
designed to catch our eye,
to excite us, to be
beautiful, but not to cause us
to focus for hours to study them.
It's exactly the opposite
when I look at a print
or broadside of this book
from the 18th century.
It's something you would come back
to again and again and enjoy.
And you might sit with another person
and study these things and say,
"Oh this refers to this funny aphorism."
Or, "I think I figured out
what this thing means."
So, that they're really, they're ciphers.
They're visual jokes, they're puzzles.
(low-key music)
