Introduction -- The Bubble Act and the First Corporate Economy -- ‘Mr Morice is said to appear at the head’: The Bubble Act and an Aborted Joint-Stock Slave-Trading Company -- ‘That ever-memorable year of epidemical infatuation’: Incorporation, the Jamaica Mines Company, and the Bubble...

This book explores the period from World War I through the 1920s in order to answer the question: did a financial "bubble" form, and if so, could it have been anticipated? Using new data and over 100 years of stock market returns, real-life models used by investors and modern research, the...