Investigate Fresh Perspectives on the South Sea Bubble through ECCO III Research
Introducing ECCO III: A Groundbreaking Digital Archive
Get ready for an exciting new addition to the world of historical research! Our company has created an interactive exhibit called Bursting the Bubble, which will showcase the capabilities of the upcoming digital archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Part III (ECCO III).
In the early 18th century, the term "South Sea" referred specifically to South America and its surrounding waters. This era was marked by the rise of the South Sea Company, a British enterprise that held chartered trade rights, including the asiento – the exclusive permission to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas, as granted by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.
The South Sea Bubble, a financial crisis that occurred in 1720, is one of the most significant events of the period. Bursting the Bubble uses ECCO III to examine this event by focusing on the contemporary texts that tried to make sense of the collapse. The materials in ECCO III preserve the printed wreckage left behind when the South Sea Bubble burst, including satirical broadsides, moral commentaries, and other texts.
Women comprised up to 20% of investors in the South Sea Company, and their involvement took on a symbolic weight in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Bursting the Bubble reveals a field of competing claims rendered in print by people with different stakes in the outcome of the South Sea Bubble.
ECCO III boasts full-color scanning and is the most accessible, geographically diverse, and visually compelling database for eighteenth-century research that has ever existed. Scheduled to arrive in 2026, it will be the most significant update to the archive in two decades, adding materials from the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.
Printed materials, such as illustrated books and navigational maps, made distant locations feel tangible and reinforced the idea that an empire could be charted, purchased, and possessed. ECCO III brings these dispersed texts into a unified archive, allowing scholars to examine the crisis through the interpretive work of contemporary thinkers.
Moreover, ECCO III offers instructors the opportunity to incorporate more ephemeral sources into their teaching, providing students with a broader understanding of the empire's formation. The materials in ECCO III complicate traditional narratives and invite new forms of scholarly inquiry into global history, gender, empire, linguistics, and colonial knowledge systems.
With ECCO III, researchers will have access to every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, as well as thousands of important works from the Americas published from 1700 to 1799. This includes full-text books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, directories, Bibles, sheet music, sermons, advertisements, and a wide variety of other printed materials in HTML and PDF formats.
Register your interest on the product page to receive updates on ECCO III, or request a trial if you aren't yet an ECCO subscriber. This groundbreaking digital archive supports historians, literary scholars, and researchers in early modern studies by making rare and geographically dispersed eighteenth-century materials widely accessible and searchable, thus significantly enhancing the study of the eighteenth century from a global and transatlantic perspective.
[1] ProQuest: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) [2] Gale: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) [3] JSTOR: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
- With the introduction of ECCO III, a digital archive, the realm of lifelong learning and education-and-self-development will benefit from having a vast collection of eighteenth-century materials, accessible online, for sustainable-living and technology-based research.
- The home-and-garden of academic research is set for a tech-savvy overhaul with the arrival of ECCO III, ensuring that data-and-cloud-computing platforms in the twenty-first century can preserve the historical context of lifestyles in the eighteenth century.
- The online-education landscape will experience a transformative shift as ECCO III catalogs and preserves works on a wide array of topics, making it a valuable resource for scholars specializing in lifestyle, technology, sustainable-living, and education-and-self-development.
- By bolstering the system of lifelong learning through ECCO III, individuals can study the history and interconnectivity of societies and empires across continents, preparing for a future built on a foundation of knowledge and insight into the eighteenth century from a global and transatlantic perspective.
