The South Sea Company was the English financial scheme at the center of the South Sea Bubble, which collapsed in 1720. Its shares rose spectacularly before confidence failed and prices plunged.
The company had been established in 1711 and received a government-backed arrangement connected with Britain’s public debt. Investors were attracted by expectations of profitable trade with Spanish America, although the company’s actual commercial prospects were far more limited than the speculation suggested.
The bubble was part of a wider European speculative episode that also involved France’s Mississippi Company. Parliamentary investigations later uncovered corruption and improper financial promotion. The South Sea episode is often remembered as an early example of boom-and-bust investing, but it was not a modern exchange crash in the same institutional sense as 1929 or 1987.