The South Sea Company was a British joint-stock company founded in 1711 as a public-private partnership that took on a portion of British government debt in exchange for a monopoly on trade with Spanish South America, including the asiento contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies. The company is best known for the South Sea Bubble of 1720, a period of wild speculation in its shares, fuelled by a further debt-conversion scheme, that drove the stock price up roughly tenfold before it collapsed within months, ruining many investors and provoking a parliamentary inquiry that implicated several government ministers and company directors in corruption. Despite the crash the company survived as a much diminished financial institution, continuing to manage a portion of the national debt and conduct limited trade for over a century afterward, and it was not formally dissolved until 1853.
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