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Abstract
This dissertation explores how the opulent musical milieu of early eighteenth-century Britain—characterized by the soaring arias, proliferating ballads, fledgling opera ventures, an expanding music printing industry, and entrepreneurial musicians and patrons—can prompt us to think anew about the South Sea Bubble. Far from merely a dramatic episode in our economic past, this early modern financial crisis, viewed through the interplay of music and money, reveals itself as a momentous chapter in the history of modern culture.
Drawing on recent insights from Economic Humanities, financial anthropology, and the cultural turn in studies of the British Financial Revolution, this dissertation investigates music’s active yet often neglected role in shaping and reflecting the English political economy during the 1720 crisis. By expanding the archival ambit of eighteenth-century music scholarship—contextualizing musical sources alongside records of government, accounting, corporate management, and stock trading—this musical history of the South Sea Bubble lays bare the deep intersections of cultural production and nascent financial capitalism, illuminating a pre-disciplinary era when arts and politics, music and money, aesthetics and economics freely informed one another along a shared discursive continuum.
Two distinct musical genres closely intertwined with the 1720 crisis are examined in detail: 1) the Italian operas staged by the Royal Academy of Music, a chartered joint-stock company born out of English entrepreneurial zeal; and 2) the English ballads that erupted from London’s Exchange Alley, functioning as both market reportage and musical entertainment in the throes of the South Sea frenzy. On the one hand, an institutional analysis of the Royal Academy’s incorporation reveals how the joint-stock opera model reoriented English musical practice towards financial capital and markets, while also demonstrating the latter’s capacity to entrench itself within cultural production and shape the construction of musical meaning. On the other hand, a media-material study of the bubble ballads brings music to bear on the recent historiographic turn towards a behavioral understanding of the nature of the South Sea crisis, seen as a public mania conditioned by the contemporaneous mediascape and the contagious spread of evolving economic narratives and sentiments.
This dissertation argues that music, by rendering the early modern bubble economy audible, allows us to recover the enduring lessons of the 1720 financial crisis as historical, sensorial experiences. Music echoes with the visceral impacts of the monetarist fantasy of infinite growth, the conflicting notions of economic liberty, and the epistemic fragility of derivatives finance. By tuning into these resonances, music reveals that modern financial capitalism, from its inception, has not just rested on data and metrics but also on cultural experiences and imaginations. This study of the historical entanglement between music and money challenges the functionalist tendencies of economic history writing—a reminder that the market has always been a matter of feeling as much as fact.
