“Give Their Service for Nothing”: Bubbles, Corruption, and their Effect on the Founding of Georgia

Abstract

It hath pleased God to visit this Land, and make us feel the fatal Effects of our Corruption and Folly," wrote Anglo-Irish clergyman George Berkeley in 1721, after taking in the calamity of the South Sea Bubble. 1 His pamphlet chastised the people of Great Britain, and urged them to use this opportunity to discover the reasons for the overvaluation and subsequent crash, and then to remedy them. He believed he knew what the problem was: the bubble and crash was the result of the moral failings of the British people. They were "bewitched and debauched" by prosperity, and completely lacking in "Industry, Sobriety of Manners, and the Fear of God." 2 He was particularly skeptical of "Money or Credit circulating through a Nation . . . without producing Labour and Industry in the inhabitants," calling it "direct Gaming." 3 People who engaged in these schemes to make money without work were "cunning Men" who could too easily prey upon the weak and less informed. To Berkeley, one of the terrible results from this national drive to get rich quickly, was that as a nation they were ignoring the poor. He proposed several solutions to solve Britain's many ills exposed by the bubble, including new taxes and more religion. He concluded that what was most needed was greater "Public Spirit" rather than "centering all our cares upon private Interest." 4 Berkeley was a clergyman, so he might be expected to find the moral failings of selfishness and greed at the root of the national scandal and financial market collapse. In writing about the causes of the South Sea Bubble, he engaged in philosophical and cultural debates surrounding the value of "private interest," by this time defined as economic interest, versus public good. Since at least the late