In this compact, well-written, and engaging book, Patrick Walsh explores the transnational dimensions of the South Sea Bubble. Building on P. G. M. Dickson's seminal work on the Financial Revolution and grounded firmly on more recent scholarship, Walsh's analysis challenges traditional historiographical approaches that cast the South Sea Bubble as an English, and more particularly, as a London-based, event. While not discounting the role of the metropolis, Walsh sets out to demonstrate how places typically understood as peripheral were affected by, and involved in the construction of, a larger financial landscape.

Using Ireland as a lens, Walsh intervenes in two of the principal debates about the Bubble—namely, the nature and extent of its impacts and the behavior of investors. In assessing the short-term and long-term effects of the Bubble on Ireland, and in gauging the behavior of Irish investors as either “rational or speculative,” Walsh qualifies the common view of the Bubble as the great crisis of the Financial Revolution, and he does so by stressing that it was not all doom and gloom.

In order to unravel the predominantly negative “Myth of the Bubble,” Walsh decouples the Financial Revolution from the Glorious Revolution and emphasizes instead the evolutionary characteristics of Irish financial systems. Tracing the growth of Irish banking in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he detects slow and cautious development in the financial sector. Unlike Scotland or England, there was no push to establish a national bank, joint-stock companies, or mercantile credit in Ireland. Instead, Irish bankers focused on remitting inland balances or transferring funds across the Irish Sea to absentees in London. Irish finance was evolving but not innovative in these early years; following the lead of the London banks, Irish bankers directed their efforts towards integrating and maintaining their connections with, the metropolis.

The South Sea Company changed this situation by creating possibilities and opening up opportunities for Irish investors. Using Bank of England ledgers and additional sources, Walsh revises upwards Dickson's figures for Irish stockholders and shows that there were at least 136 Irish investors, making the Irish the third largest group of “foreign investors” in the South Sea Company. Moving beyond counting names to demonstrate that Irish investors were speculating in the London market for the first time in substantial numbers, Walsh examines private papers and correspondence to piece together the motivations and experiences of these people. With case studies of individuals such as Lord Perceval, Lord Kenmare, and Madame Catherine da Cunha, Walsh teases out information networks through which news, gossip, and advice were disseminated. This evidence reveals how Irish investors were aware of crucial political developments, were able to weigh up and critique information, and were capable of making logical financial investments to provide for the future well-being of their families. Irish investors were not ignorant, provincial rubes following the “wisdom of the crowds” but were informed, prudent, and able to build on lessons learned during the evolution of a dynamic financial world in the early eighteenth century.

By the time of the speculative boom of 1720, that evolution had reached the point where Ireland was ready to look away from London. The floating of three bank schemes and two fire-insurance proposals within a year demonstrated the existence of an “investment community” in Ireland willing to experiment with the latest financial innovations. The interest in a national bank not only reflected confidence in paper money but was also a conscious attempt to prevent the drainage of capital from Ireland by encouraging Irish investors to keep their money at home instead of sending it to London.

Walsh highlights these constructive aspects of the Bubble in Ireland but does not overplay his hand. Turning his attention to the collapse of South Sea stock prices in late 1720, he finds that the bursting of the Bubble had a significant short-term economic impact on Ireland. The ledgers of private banks, customs records, and private correspondence show that trade slowed, tax revenues fell, unemployment in proto-industrial sectors rose, and a credit squeeze occurred due to a lack of circulating money. Taken together, these developments demonstrate that the bursting of the Bubble produced an external shock to the domestic economy of Ireland. Furthermore, the bursting of the Bubble had a significant long-term impact by effectively killing the proposal for a national bank, which failed to make it through the Irish parliament. The events of 1720 represented a missed opportunity, and Ireland would have to wait until the very different conditions of 1783 to get a national bank, when the interests of the Irish legislature and investing public converged.

One of the notable strengths of this book is its use of print culture to inform the analysis; what Walsh refers to as “Reading” (and “Misreading”) the Bubble. Drawing on the works of more familiar figures, such as Jonathan Swift, and a range of materials, including newspapers, pamphlets, prints, and playing cards, Walsh traces the shifting terrain of public debate and its impact on the Irish financial world. By exploiting the South Sea Company's successful propaganda campaigns and skillfully managing the provincial press, Irish writers first helped to create an active investment community in Ireland, and then participated in its dissolution by propagating the “Myth of the Bubble.” An implicit point throughout the book seems to be that the development of an emerging capital market in Ireland ran parallel to the development of an emerging public sphere, and that these two things fed off of and shaped one another in important and interesting ways. While Walsh exposes moments of intersection in multiple chapters, the book might benefit from clearer signposting in the introduction to highlight these threads in the reader's mind and a return to these themes in a more robust conclusion that spells out how far we can push these connections, and what they can tell us more generally. But this is a minor criticism of a tightly argued book that overall makes an important contribution to scholarship on eighteenth-century Ireland and Britain.