(Note: I submitted this before the original CfP deadline, but when it was extended to November 1, I took advantage of the extra time to find some colleagues and put together a full panel proposal. This paper is now part of that panel proposal, so I'd like to withdraw it as an individual submission.)
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 investor,s 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.