‘Mr Morice is said to appear at the head’ The Bubble Act and an aborted joint-stock slave trading company
In June 1720 Humphry Morice, notorious as Britain’s highest-volume trafficker of enslaved
African human beings, sought additional operating capital by converting his privately-owned
operation into a joint-stock company. While most of the promoters of the many speculative
projects of the summer of 1720 advertised to all and sundry in London’s newspapers, Morice instead
circulated word of his new project around the capital’s more exclusive social networks, both
mercantile and gentry. The messages he soon received from more than 50 potential investors
including soon-to-be Prime Minister Robert Walpole, showed both how they evaluated his
reputation for profitable business and how they sought to present themselves as desirable backers.
Like the more speculative projects of the year of the South Sea Bubble, Morice had to
contend with the passage that summer of the so-called Bubble Act, which sought to ban the practice
of raising capital on subscriptions, and which is today often assumed to have forbidden the
establishment of joint-stock companies altogether until its repeal in 1825. Morice consulted with
five of the London legal establishment’s best-known experts in trying to find loopholes in the new
legislation that would allow him to carry out his foray into the capital markets. While this effort was
not successful and Morice soon let his project lapse, the replies he received from his legal
consultants show a variety of different strategies for how to structure a post-Bubble Act company.
They also demonstrate clearly that, although it took decades for lawyers eventually to defeat the
Bubble Act by creating the unincorporated business company, this process began as soon as Parliament
passed it.
