A Very English Deceit, The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal

The early years of the 18th-century produced two great monuments: one, Christopher Wren's new cathedral of St Paul's, an enduring testament to principled craft and masterful construction, the other an empty fraud of such magnitude that its collapse threatened to overturn monarchies and governments. Its failure delayed the introduction of modern market economies by two generations. Yet the full scale of this monumental deceit was quietly covered up and hidden, its enduring legacy a poorly understood colloquialism: the South Sea Bubble.