Women investors, ‘that nasty south sea affair’ and the rage to speculate in early eighteenth-century England

Abstract The excursions of the five unmarried Hastings sisters and their widowed friend Jane Bonnell into the stock market show how changes in the availability of credit and the services offered by banks in the early eighteenth century had an impact on ordinary citizens. At the time of the South Sea Bubble all six bought South Sea shares through their bank. But their trading activities and investment strategies differed and had different outcomes, showing there are no easy associations between gender and ideas of risk or safe investment.