ABSTRACT
Innumerable changes in the 1880s, and above all in the 1890s, indicated that there was developing a more highly urbanized mass society than had existed even as late as the 1870s. With this increased urbanization, the establishment of a more complex system of communications and the great growth of banking and commerce, London regained its pre-eminence as the capital, not only of a kingdom and empire, but of the whole of the world’s financial system. Never the centre of a particular branch of commerce and industry to the extent that Manchester and Birmingham were, and never an industrial city in the modern sense, it tended to assume a more dominating position as the City’s financial activities assumed more and more importance in the national economy, providing the sole means by which the gap between the country’s imports and exports could be made good. The annual adverse balance of trade in commodities was at an annual average of £62-2 million in the first half of the 1870s; but this figure, itself a record, had risen to £160.6 million in the late 1890s; even though the rate at which the gap had widened had
slowed somewhat in the 1880s, it was even then over fifty per cent greater than it had been in the 1860s. The income from insurance, banking, and foreign investments continued to increase in the late-Victorian era, and more and more was society becoming aware of the power of finance. The ‘bloated capitalist’ of the socialist cartoonist was not attired like a manufacturer, but like a City financier. There began to develop the folk-myth of the American share-pusher and the German or German-Jewish millionaire as hidden powers behind the London financial world. It was pointed out in 1890 that the names of Rothschild, Speyer, Stern, Seligman and Frühling were among the weightiest in the City and that other names of importance were S.P.Morgan (American) and Hambro (Danish).
