Selling the New World

France and England laid the groundwork for stock share mania by enlisting state-licensed colonial trading companies to refinance their national debts. At the time of its founding, France’s Company of the West, later renamed the Company of the Indies (popularly known as the Mississippi Company), concentrated its commercial activities in the kingdom’s colony of Louisiana. Extending from the Mississippi River Delta to the Great Lakes, Louisiana quickly became mythologized as a bountiful Eden. Meanwhile, England’s South Sea Company was chartered to pursue commerce in Latin America and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Though its principal business was the transport of enslaved Africans to the Spanish Americas, it compelled similar fantasies of New World abundance.

Propaganda in the form of maps, travel literature, and prints soared as rivalry intensified between the two countries, each anxious to contain the other’s foothold in the Americas and to monopolize relations with Indigenous communities. Luring both investors and colonists with the promise of easy money, these promotional pieces stoked visions of fertile pastures, priceless metals, and welcoming Natives. Such fictions readily appealed to a population still recovering from years of deprivation, brought on by the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), followed by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), and, in 1714, a “Great Frost” that ravaged Europe.

In reality, the English had little hope of conducting trade in the Spanish-controlled Americas. As for the French colony, Louisiana was an unprofitable swamp. Its feeble workforce was bolstered only by the forced migration of convicts, prostitutes, and wards of the state, as well as by the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1719, one year after the founding of New Orleans.