South Sea Company

The South Sea Company was a British joint-stock company established in January 1711 as a public-private partnership meant to consolidate and reduce the cost of Britain's national debt, in exchange for a monopoly on trade with Spanish America that in practice centered on supplying enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies and proved largely unprofitable. Speculation in the company's stock drove its share price from around one hundred pounds to nearly one thousand pounds over the course of 1720 before it collapsed back to about one hundred pounds by the year's end, ruining thousands of investors in the episode known as the South Sea Bubble and exposing widespread fraud and corruption among the company's directors and allied government officials.