The South Sea bubble was the great crisis of the financial revolution. The rapid rise of the South Sea Company's share price in late spring and early summer 1720, followed by its even more dramatic collapse in late August through to early September, instantly became the stuff of myth and legend. News of events in London quickly spread, not just across England and Wales, or even to Scotland and Ireland, but also across the Channel to the European continent and beyond. The reverberations of the London stock-market crash were felt in major and minor financial markets: in Amsterdam, Paris and Hamburg, as well as in Berne, Berlin, Dublin and Edinburgh. This transnational impact of the bubble reflected both the profile of investors in the South Sea Company and the organization's own global interests. From its incorporation in 1711 as a trading concern focusing on the Spanish colonies in South America, the company attracted investors from beyond the traditional financial heartland of the City. This was, of course, not unusual for British joint-stock enterprises during the age of the financial revolution, but during the ‘year of the bubbles’ the South Sea Company would become the most cosmopolitan of these corporations, eclipsing the more established Royal African and East India companies. Indeed such was the range of its shareholders' origins during the bubble that it probably had one of the most internationally diverse investor bases of all the contemporary major European joint-stock companies.