2020 marks the 300th anniversary of the crashing of the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, investment schemes – based on slavery, colonialism, and the need to fund standing militaries accompanying them through large-scale public borrowing – that caused a general international liquidity crisis, deflation, and depression. This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies seeks submissions exploring not only the consequences to Europe of this financial crisis, but also its global effects, particularly as they relate to empires of trade and administration.The editor, Sean Moore, is soliciting interdisciplinary papers that ask questions such as:
How are empire and militarism connected to finance? In what ways were people as well as things financialized during this crisis? Was the mode of capitalism put into motion by the Financial Revolution of the early eighteenth century fundamentally racist and/or colonialist? How should our understanding of these bubbles be shaped not only by the politics that went into making them, but also the politics of the bailouts that followed? What role did publicity and propaganda in the print media play in these events, and how might literature, art, and other forms of humanistic expression be connected with it? As these questions demonstrate, we are seeking submissions that are both interdisciplinary in nature and international in scope, moving beyond considering the bubbles’ effects only in Britain and France and towards how those effects rippled throughout Europe, the Atlantic, and the globe.The goal is to publish this issue in 2020 to mark the anniversaries of the bursting of these bubbles. Submissions are required by June 1, 2019, to ensure that the review process of the manuscripts is complete by that time. Please submit to ec.studies@unh.edu, and feel free to contact Sean Moore (Sean.Moore@unh.edu), about ideas for this issue. Manuscripts should generally be between 7,500 and 9,000 words. A detailed list of submission guidelines can be found on the journal’s website.