Introduction

Foreign finance is traditionally said to have been of singular importance to the economic development of Europe and the Americas. In C. K. Hobson’s opinion, for the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘British capital and finance were ever ready to lend a helping hand’; British investment in Continental Europe ‘attained enormous dimensions during the ‘fifties’. ¹ Leland Jenks finds that the export of British capital reached its maximum for the nineteenth century in the twenty-five years after the Californian gold strike of 1848. ² Herbert Feis describes Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century as ‘virtually the only important source of capital for those countries which lay outside the circle of Western Europe’. ³ David Landes talks of the years after 1815 as ‘the great age of the Barings and the Rothschilds, … of the entry of far-off, exotic countries into the European financial market’. ⁴ The flow of funds from Britain to the Continent, Landes thinks, reached a high point during the railway boom of the 1840s; most went into the government securities and public works of France. ⁵ Eric Hobsbawm estimates a rise in British overseas credits from about £160 million in the early 1840s to almost £1 billion by the time of the international financial crisis of 1873. ⁶ Others have followed the same, exhilarating path – Penelope Hartland, ⁷ A. R. Hall, ⁸ Matthew Simon, ⁹ Philip Cottrell. ¹⁰