South Sea Bubble - Bancroft Collection

The South Sea Bubble – Bancroft Collection, collected by Hugh Bancroft, a graduate of Harvard College and former president of Dow Jones & Company, and donated in 1935 by Bancroft’s widow, Mrs. Jane Bancroft, is the foundation of the South Sea Bubble Collection held in Baker Library, Special Collection and Archives. It consists of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, Parliamentary acts, engravings, broadsides, plays, ballads, and assorted ephemera. Additional texts and manuscripts are held in the Kress Collection of Business and Economics, acquired from Herbert Somerton Foxwell, lecturer and teacher of political economy at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and University College, London, shortly after his death in 1936.

The South Sea Bubble collection is cataloged in the Harvard Library catalog HOLLIS. Items available online through HOLLIS are tagged Online Access.

The collection can also be explored through the publication The South Sea Company: A Checklist of Materials in Baker Library, Harvard Business School, commemorating the 300th anniversary of the South Sea Bubble of 1720.