ABSTRACT
The Mediterranean has a special role in the history of France, and its economic history in particular. France’s long Mediterranean coastline makes it a part of that region’s history – yet it also shares borders with northern Europe. If, following Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, we agree that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Mediterranean zone was ‘subordinated to the financing and investment strategies of Northern Europe’s industrial centres’,2 France could also be included among the Northern European nations. The many impecunious States around the Mediterranean basin, such as Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt, tapped into France’s savings; and that, together with the French colonization of North Africa, transformed financial institutions into the instruments and actors of French influence in this region. Bank archives reveal how ‘French-style imperialism’3 developed and how it competed with British and German imperialisms, in addition to revealing lives of the economic players themselves.
