Obviously academic historians cannot be immune to the anxieties of the times in which they live and work. Recent experience of the malign and remarkably wide-ranging effects of financial speculation has thus been reflected in an increasing interest among early modernists in the ‘financial revolution’ which Peter Dickson first identified, described and explained almost half a century ago, and John Brewer then re-worked in 1989 into an influential account of what he christened the British ‘fiscal-military state’. In recent years there has been an efflorescence of writing on the ‘fiscal-military state’: books, articles, essays and conference papers. Appropriately, the new generation of scholars who have taken up the subject are seeing it in a broader context, as not merely an English but a British, even a European phenomenon. Nor has Ireland been ignored, despite the fact that its economy in this period appears as merely a small and sickly child alongside that of its overgrown imperial neighbour. Among the more significant contributions to our understanding of the nexus of money and state power in eighteenth-century Ireland, Ivar McGrath has painstakingly traced the development of public finance in the aftermath of the Williamite revolution. More controversially, Sean Moore has attempted to alter the course of Swiftian studies to argue that the framework of the dean’s later satires should be understood in the context of the rise in Dublin in the 1720s and 1730s of an all-consuming financial interest, a thesis which, it should be noted, has been comprehensively refuted by specialist scholars in both English literature and economic history.

Patrick Walsh has already made several telling interventions himself in the debate about the existence of an Irish ‘fiscal-military state’, as well as completing a model biography of one of the politicians who might be thought of as its architects: Speaker William Conolly. He now seeks to assess the impact on Ireland of the great crisis of the English ‘financial revolution’, the South Sea Bubble. The collapse of the company in September 1720 was the equivalent for the early eighteenth-century financial system of our own ‘credit crunch’ of 2007–08. During the two decades before 1720 bluff landed gentlemen and conservative thinkers who had at first been hostile to new-fangled notions that money could take a liquid, even a vaporous, form, as credit or stock, had been gradually persuading themselves that their instinctive suspicions were without practical justification. Many had bought stock in the South Sea Company. The crash was thus an enormous shock, not only to the financial system, but to public confidence more generally.

The Bubble has usually been written about as an exclusively English disaster. Historians have been well aware of its French equivalent, the Mississippi Bubble, but within the composite state ruled over by King George I, little or no attention has been paid to the peripheries, since it was assumed that the comparatively under-developed economies of Scotland and Ireland, dominated by agriculture, possessed comparatively little spare capital for investment. In fact, as Dr Walsh is able to show, Irish investors were represented among the holders of South Sea stock in small but not insubstantial numbers. The vast majority seem to have been landowners, though not all were aristocratic absentees, receiving their incomes from Ireland while living in England. The precise impact on Ireland of the bursting of the Bubble is, however, harder to assess: certainly, it must have made even worse the chronic problem of the shortage of money in circulation, and the coincidence of the South Sea crash with the onset of severe economic difficulties for all social groups, from landlords with diminishing rental returns to Dublin weavers experiencing acute distress, suggests there must have been at least some knock-on effects. Swift’s poem, ‘The Bubble’ (1721), which has often been understood in a purely English context, can thus be shown to have a strong resonance in Ireland, and Dr Walsh links it neatly with the dean’s attack on the Dublin bankers, published the year before.

The real importance of this study seems to lie more for the history of politics and political thought in Ireland than for the history of the Irish economy or Irish finance, for all the useful detail that it contains about investments. Certainly, Dr Walsh’s thorough research and careful exposition – strong features of his previous book – have successfully answered, as far as the evidence permits, questions over the extent of Irish involvement in the South Sea Bubble, and should prevent future English historians from seeing it as an exclusively English event. But he would not claim to have changed significantly our understanding of the development of the Irish banking and financial sector in this period, nor is he so crass as to suggest that Ireland was enjoying a ‘financial revolution’ on a par with the English. What he has done, however, is to put into their proper context the political debates in Ireland in the early 1720s, in parliament and in the press. He is particularly good on the controversy over the establishment of a national bank in 1721, which we can now see as heavily influenced by the practical experience of Irish peers and M.P.s in the failure of the South Sea Company. The book is an admirable example of scrupulous empirical research; its conclusions led by the evidence, but not going beyond it, and resisting the temptation to build extravagant superstructures of interpretation on flimsy foundations. It is pleasantly ironical to find this circumspect and methodical approach applied so successfully to elucidate the most notorious episode of mass irrationality in the early eighteenth-century financial market.