Transnational Networks in 1720 and the German Quincampoix
Soon after the performance of the stage version of Quincampoix in Amsterdam, a German translation appeared. The text is substantially the same, though ‘localised’ with German place names and relocated to the city of Hamburg. The German text is one of a number of satirical and other texts about the Bubbles, which circulated in the German lands and which bespeak the interest and involvement of Germans in the global financial excitement of the years around 1720. The specific occasion of the German Quincampoix is very likely the project for a joint-stock insurance company that led to a mini-bubble in Hamburg in the summer of 1720. This chapter explores the text itself, identifying specifically German aspects of it and their referents. It considers how and by whom the anonymous translation may have been produced, and who its readers may have been, setting it in the context of what we know of the publishing history of other German Bubble texts, the specific resonances of the global crisis in the city of Hamburg and the evidence for flows and exchanges of financial information and debate between Germany’s principal outward-facing port and the seats of Bubble activity in London, Paris and Amsterdam.