Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Constructing Atlantic Peripheries: A Critical View of the Historiography
- 2 Did Prussia have an Atlantic History? The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, the French Colonization of Guiana, and Climates in the Caribbean, c. 1760s to 1780s
- 3 A Fierce Competition! Silesian Linens and Indian Cottons on the West African Coast in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
- 4 Prussia’s New Gate to the World: Stettin’s Overseas Imports (1720–1770) and Prussia’s Rise to Power
- 5 Luxuries from the Periphery: The Global Dimensions of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Rhubarb Trade
- 6 Atlantic Sugar and Central Europe: Sugar Importers in Hamburg and their Trade with Bordeaux and Lisbon, 1733–1798
- 7 A Gateway to the Spanish Atlantic? The Habsburg Port City of Trieste as Intermediary in Commodity Flows between the Habsburg Monarchy and Spain in the Eighteenth Century
- 8 A Cartel on the Periphery: Wupper Valley Merchants and their Strategies in Atlantic Trade (1790s–1820s)
- 9 Linen and Merchants from the Duchy of Berg, Lower Saxony and Westphalia, and their Global Trade in Eighteenth-Century London
- 10 Ambiguous Passages: Non-Europeans Brought to Europe by the Moravian Brethren during the Eighteenth Century
- 11 German Emigrants as a Commodity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
- 12 Reorienting Atlantic World Financial Capitalism: America and the German States
- 13 Afterword
- Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited
- Index
- People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History
12 - Reorienting Atlantic World Financial Capitalism: America and the German States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Constructing Atlantic Peripheries: A Critical View of the Historiography
- 2 Did Prussia have an Atlantic History? The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, the French Colonization of Guiana, and Climates in the Caribbean, c. 1760s to 1780s
- 3 A Fierce Competition! Silesian Linens and Indian Cottons on the West African Coast in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
- 4 Prussia’s New Gate to the World: Stettin’s Overseas Imports (1720–1770) and Prussia’s Rise to Power
- 5 Luxuries from the Periphery: The Global Dimensions of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Rhubarb Trade
- 6 Atlantic Sugar and Central Europe: Sugar Importers in Hamburg and their Trade with Bordeaux and Lisbon, 1733–1798
- 7 A Gateway to the Spanish Atlantic? The Habsburg Port City of Trieste as Intermediary in Commodity Flows between the Habsburg Monarchy and Spain in the Eighteenth Century
- 8 A Cartel on the Periphery: Wupper Valley Merchants and their Strategies in Atlantic Trade (1790s–1820s)
- 9 Linen and Merchants from the Duchy of Berg, Lower Saxony and Westphalia, and their Global Trade in Eighteenth-Century London
- 10 Ambiguous Passages: Non-Europeans Brought to Europe by the Moravian Brethren during the Eighteenth Century
- 11 German Emigrants as a Commodity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
- 12 Reorienting Atlantic World Financial Capitalism: America and the German States
- 13 Afterword
- Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited
- Index
- People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History
Summary
The story of transatlantic finance in the nineteenth century has often been one that fixates largely on a US-British binary. Capital flows between these two nations (increasingly centered around financial instruments pertaining to cotton) have been detailed at length in an array of monographs. While some historians have explored the power of Dutch financiers, especially as it pertained to American railroad stock, little attention has been paid to German financiers in the nineteenth century, specifically as it pertains to their increasing interest and interconnectedness with the United States. While this paucity of attention is partly down to a dearth of surviving primary source evidence, the importance of connections between German financiers and American counterparts helps to explain not only evolving notions of transatlantic finance, but also in part the respective rise of these two economies as they eclipsed the British by the early twentieth century. What began as two economies operating on the periphery of a dominant British financial network in the earlier part of the nineteenth century evolved by the century’s end. Finance played but one part in this narrative of American and German ascension, but the financing of debt is one window into this critical story of the nineteenth century.
American Civil War bonds in particular offer a window into domestic – but perhaps even more crucially – international ramifications of the conflict. While traditional Civil War diplomacy is a topic of much exploration, little has been said in regard to the financial dimensions of the war on the international stage. For Civil War bonds played a large role in reorienting transatlantic banking structures for United States’ banks in the nineteenth century, paving the way for a new era of American finance. Crucial to all of this were the emerging financial ties between the United States and the German states – two relative financial peripheries compared to London, Paris and Amsterdam – as the Civil War drastically expanded their financial footprints globally. The financial connections between the German states and the United States that grew and developed from 1848 onwards play a vital role in understanding the development of financial networks between these two nations.
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- Information
- Globalized PeripheriesCentral Europe and the Atlantic World, 1680-1860, pp. 205 - 222Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020