This article from The Financial Times titled “What the South Sea Company can teach us” explores the history book “Money For Nothing” by Thomas Levenson on The South Sea Bubble. From the following quote from the article, it seems that Levenson combines interesting perspectives on the history of science and economics:
What differentiates Levenson’s account from the many earlier ones is his background as a science writer and academic at MIT. His broad thesis is that by the turn of the 18th century the power of mathematics and habits of observation associated with the scientific revolution created new ways to think about the future. In effect, the likes of Newton and Edmond Halley, the astronomer, developed a formal framework for thinking about money, risk and uncertainty, which came to full fruition in the financial engineering that characterised the bubble year of 1720.