ABSTRACT
While the Mississippi Company was struggling in Paris during the spring of 1720, the fortunes of another firm were rising across the channel in London. In fact, investors who liquidated their Mississippi Company shares and transferred funds to London contributed directly to the initiation of the South Sea Bubble. Political support for the South Sea charter came from the Tory party, who viewed the charter as a counterbalance to the Bank of England. Parliament granted the South Sea Company a monopoly to trade with Spanish colonies in the South Seas-almost the entire Central and South American coast. The principal economic problem that faced the state at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the national debt, an outcome of spending incurred during the War of the Spanish Succession. At the end of the Spanish War, the Utrecht Treaty of 1713 gave the British the Asiento, the exclusive contract to trade slaves across the Atlantic.
