Abstract

Two episodes of trouble with prices stand far apart in the history of money and credit that Skeptron's records cover. In 301 the emperors issued an edict fixing maximum prices, and its preamble lays the blame for dear goods on the avarice of those who sell them. In 1720 the shares of the South Sea Company, which had won the right to take over part of the national debt, rose sharply and then collapsed. The edict has been read as an imperial pronouncement issued beside a reform of the coinage (Corcoran 1996). The popular account of 1720 is a mania (Mackay 1841), and the survey of crises as recurring patterns of credit and confidence gives that debate its systematic form (Kindleberger and Aliber 2005); against it, the year has been read as a market that fundamentals can largely explain (Garber 2000), and as a scheme of public finance inside a market system that survived it (Dale 2004; Neal 1990). This study asks of the texts of the two episodes whom they blame, whether the measure follows from the blame, and whether Skeptron's modern records keep the blame the texts lay. It reads Roland Kent's translation of the preamble (1920) and the opening of Charles Mackay's chapter on the South Sea Bubble (1841) beside Skeptron's records of the two cases. The preamble blames a few sellers by their conduct, rules out the harvest as a cause, says nothing of the coinage, and turns the conduct it forbids into penalties; it names the soldiers and the poor as those who suffered and presents the maximum as burdening only those it counts as guilty. Mackay's narrative spreads the blame across the company's directors, the legislature and a whole nation, and gives the warnings of those who predicted that the few would be enriched and the many impoverished. The measure follows from the blame in 301, clause by clause; in 1720 it does not, and the blame is laid against the Act by its opponents. The modern record of 301 keeps the blame and drops its victims and its penalties; the record of 1720 replaces blame with a mechanism. What the study adds is a distinction among three things the texts keep apart and the later accounts merge: who is blamed, who suffered, and who pays for the measure.