Risk and the "Stock-Jobbing Globe": British Speculation in California and South Africa

Making a profit in a hurry which speculation boasted of, whether digging for gold or investing in equities, was aided and abetted by innovation in communication and an expanding industrial infrastructure to service and facilitate the growth of finance capitalism in nineteenth century Britain from limited liability laws to the laying of railroad and telegraph lines. Not only was there a re-imagining of space and the geography of the city, the creation of the first modern financial center with the City of London, but a re-imagining of the geography of making money and of risk itself. Risk became increasingly diversified in the second half of the century and spread around the globe. With the altering of space and time, new attitudes and ideas arose with regard to risk and chance in general. The speed at which money could be made and lost with finance capital accelerated in contrast to industry, for example, which witnessed a more gradual accumulation of wealth and presupposed, for so many, hard work and diligence. While this paper is concerned with the geography of making money from California to South Africa and with what I have come to call the emotional economies of investment and speculation, it is most concerned with explaining how finance capitalism worked on the ground. To that end, it aims to explore the human relationships that were enacted upon in stock transactions, a demystifying of the arcane language and circumstances that surrounded political economy's vocabulary, theories, and practices. Its very abstractness, at the same time, made possible in so many ways the expansion of finance capitalism and a belief in its naturalness and inevitability.