Talk:Mississippi Company

Latest comment: 11 months ago by BW95 in topic John Law, Duke of Arkansas (or not)

PLAGIARISM? edit

Is this Plagiarism? The third paragraph has the exact same wording as page 357 here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=zMcnAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA357&lpg=PA357&dq=unknown+river,+where+his+colony+perished+by+degrees&source=web&ots=158UDsPDki&sig=kjv7VQ_UXVuuxAK1Y5c--O6MZ18&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result


—Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.171.174.106 (talk) 01:10, 23 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

External Link Suggestion edit

This web site http://www.hindsight-books.com/title.php has the full text of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble, France 1719-1720 By Adolphe Thiers which I think would be useful to Wikipedia users. No login or payment is required.Acbd18 (talk) 11:26, 28 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

convicted murderer? edit

Law has killed someone in a duel, to which he had been challenged. See the article about Law, which refers things correctly. --Werfur (talk) 19:32, 15 August 2015 (UTC)Reply


Is this spelled correctly? Shouldn't it be "Mississippi"? olderwiser 14:56, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)


The link to Fort Frontenac in the article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Frontenac, must be a different Fort. The article says the fort is on the Mouth of the Mississippi river, the linked fort is in Ontario. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jhhays (talkcontribs) 19:44, 16 July 2009 (UTC)Reply

Article Overhaul edit

  • I noticed the rather unacceptable grammar and tone in this article and elected to do an article overhaul. I've been bouncing back and forth between this and the John Law article making edits. I deleted the large swaths of unsourced material and replaced them with the more aptly written material from the John Law article (seeing as we now have a separate article for the Mississippi Company: there didn't need to be the same content on two separate pages). bwmcmaste (talk) 18:10, 3 March 2010 (UTC)Reply
  • I've completely rewritten/restructured large sections of this article and added sources for all of the material that I could find. I've also updated this article's status in both of the relevant wikiprojects to the more apt criteria. There is still room to expand this article, but anything added needs to be sourced (unlike the majority of material that was on it before). bwmcmaste (talk) 23:20, 3 March 2010 (UTC)Reply

John Law, Duke of Arkansas (or not) edit

It's written as Duc d'Arkansas in the article in case anyone wants to search for it. Anyway, these are what I've found:

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/john-laws-concession-5982/ -- After the plan’s initial success in 1717, Law’s Compagnie d’Occident was given a twenty-five-year charter to manage and settle the Louisiana Territory for France ... Law agreed ... and set aside a twelve-square-mile concession for himself near Henri de Tonti’s abandoned trading post. Had Law’s plan not failed, this settlement would have become the Duchy of Arkansas, with Law as duke.

LANDE, LAWRENCE, and TIM CONGDON. “John Law and the Invention of Paper Money.” RSA Journal 139, no. 5414 (1991): 916–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41375433 (p. 919) -- Since he controlled the colonial empire of France in the right of his company, he distributed colonial patents of nobility like a monarch, selecting for himself the title of Duke of Arkansas.

Caldwell, Norman W. “Tonty and the Beginning of Arkansas Post.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1949): 189–205. https://doi.org/10.2307/40030612 (p. 190 footnotes) -- In an article by Ernest Gagnon ... a reference is made to the creation of "the duchy of Arkansas in Louisiana." I have been unable to find the source of the authority for this statement. No such grant is mentioned in the lists of concessions.

So either Law was given the title (as in the article), or he gave himself the title, or there was a title to go along with some land, or maybe there was never any land at all. Granted, maybe somebody after 1949 found the concession as described by the Encyclopedia or Arkansas, but I haven't seen those sources, so I can't tell. To my mind, the claim is still inconclusive. BW95 (talk) 06:47, 4 June 2023 (UTC)Reply