ABSTRACT
The last significant bastion of private banking in Britain was merchant banking, which today, in its modern form, is generally labelled investment banking. Most London merchant banks traced their origins to merchant houses formed by migrants to London from mainland Europe in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. As such, they traded internationally in commodities and provided agency services to other merchants in commercial centres around the world. They moved on from this to play a vital role in the provision of short-term finance for international trade and long-term finance for, inter alia, infrastructure development around the world. Their role in mobilizing capital in London’s emerging international capital market for use by overseas borrowers was hugely important in the development of the nineteenth-century economy. It won them great prestige and extraordinary influence; they punched well above their weight and in some areas worked as equals alongside giants such as Deutsche Bank and Crédit Lyonnais.
