ABSTRACT
The history of the role of European banks and, particularly of British banks, in nineteenth-century Latin America is frequently misinterpreted as a result of the prevalence of a series of traditional but largely unexplored suppositions. The most common of these is that British banks traditionally dominated Latin American finances and faced little competition from domestic banks.1 The second is that the operation of foreign banks and bankers in Latin America followed a standard pattern and that there was relatively little diversity from country to country. Moreover, the role of non-British banks and bankers - particularly French and German - in Latin America tends to be neglected.2 It is the purpose of the present paper to use recent research on the history of Latin American banking to indicate the need for a revision of the traditional stereotypes as well as to suggest the richness and diversity of the history of both domestic and foreign banking in the sub-continent during both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
