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From Germany to the Caribbean: The Baring Bank of London’s Involvement in the Slave Plantation Economy

Along with Barclays, RBS, and Lloyd’s,1 the Baring Bank of London was one of the most influential financial institutions in shaping the Atlantic economy in the 1800s. Although the bank was famous for its government bonds, investments in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803,2 and the silver transfer from Mexico to Spain in 1805,3 little is known about its involvement in the Caribbean slave plantation economy. Therefore, this blog post sheds light on the investments of London’s oldest merchant bank in the plantation economy of English Jamaica, Danish St. Croix, and Dutch–English Suriname and Berbice, and argues that the bank, owned by the brothers Francis and John Baring, played a crucial role in sustaining the Caribbean slave plantations during the 1800s by providing mortgages, credits, and loans to the European owners of exploitative, high-risk, and capital-intensive slave plantations, who often repaid their instalments in the form of slave-grown produce such as sugar, coffee, cotton, and rum. Combining scattered archival documents from England, the Netherlands and Germany, this blog post examines, in particular, the financial flows between Baring, its partner financial institutions, and plantation owners in the Caribbean and comes to the surprising conclusion that the slave plantation business, despite the boundary-crossing movement of capital and investors of various origins, remained nationality-bound by colony until the produce-based repayment model of the Dutch negotiatie was replaced by the monetary repayment mode of English mortgages from the year 1820.

Continue reading From Germany to the Caribbean: The Baring Bank of London’s Involvement in the Slave Plantation Economy
  1. Jasper Jolly, ‘Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery’, The Guardian, 18 June 2020. []
  2. The Baring Archive, London (BA), A4, ‘Louisiana Purchase Papers’ (1803–66). []
  3. Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, ‘Vincent Nolte: Global Player and Bankrupt Entrepreneur, 1779–1856’, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German–American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. []

The Modern Architecture Discourse of Design (1957–1988) through a Postcolonial Lens

This research documents how the Indian magazine Design (1957–88), along with magazines like Marg, The Indian Architect, Illustrated Weekly, Femina, and Filmfare, formalized institutions of discourse in Nehruvian modern India. Design emerged as a ‘transnational’1 agent that challenged the idea of imitating the West as a way of bringing Western modernism to India. Instead, it portrayed the role of architecture, especially modernist architecture, in the development of society and the modernization of the country. It identified national and global projects and issues that could be seen as potential instances of change and modernization in India. Architecture and design themselves were presented as media for taking these ideas into the public domain. Design promoted ‘transculturality’2 emphasizing that it should be interpreted from one’s own perspective. It commissioned the intervention of diverse constellations of media, architectural production, and cultural narratives in the socio-economic paradigm, in political communes, and in the creation of buildings and structures. This architectural production reflects the democratic process of negotiating between different attitudes and goals among the diverse actors and parties involved in the journal’s issues.

Continue reading The Modern Architecture Discourse of Design (1957–1988) through a Postcolonial Lens
  1. The German linguist Georg Curtius (1820–85) was the first user of the adjective ‘transnational’, which means transcending the limits, interests, etc. of a single nation. See Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Transnational’, in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (Basingstoke, 2009), 1047–55. []
  2. The transcultural approach originates in the conceptual term transculturación, which was coined by Fernando Ortiz in his study on processes of cultural reconfiguration in early modern Cuba, first published in 1940. Here, it is considered as a notion of cultural encounter, such that its consequences for both the socio-political and economic value of structures and their cultural identities are palpable. See Daniel G. König, ‘The Transcultural Approach Within a Disciplinary Framework: An Introduction’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, 7/2 (2016), 89–100. []

Collecting Weather Data: The Use of Scientific Instruments in Nineteenth-Century Climate Research

The climate crisis is forcing us to look more closely: weather phenomena and climatic changes are now monitored using state-of-the-art satellites, computer models, and sensors. However, recording and understanding the climate has a long history that is characterized by technological innovations and geopolitical interests, as well as everyday ideas and knowledge about climate (and weather) that cannot be recorded using scientific methods alone. My research project aims to contribute to this long history by analysing the everyday understanding of climate in the period between 1850 and 1970—that is, before the emergence of political debates on climate change and environmental degradation in response to the 1972 Club of Rome report—using various examples from German-speaking countries.

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The End of the Guilds in Syria

In the Ottoman cities of what was later to become the state of Syria, premodern guilds survived well into the 1920s. By that time, too, the infant trade union movement was beginning to take shape. Three laws shaped the transition from craft guilds to trade unions as the dominant institutions for organizing labourers in Syria. The first was the law on craft associations of 1912, issued after a group of modernist Ottoman army officers, called the Young Turks, had toppled Sultan Abdülhamid II in a revolution in 1908; the second law, on professional associations, was issued in 1935 during the French Mandate over Syria; and the third was the Labour Code, one of the very first laws issued after Syria gained independence from France in 1946. Three states—three laws. While my PhD project focuses on this period of change and the relationship between these two very different forms of organization, guilds and trade unions, the aim of my visit to the National Archives in London was to find out more about the period just before that—about the late nineteenth century and the profound changes the Ottoman guilds underwent in the wake of the capitalist penetration of the regional economy.

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Facets of Transnationalism in the Late Nineteenth Century: New Perspectives on the History of Folklore Studies

‘The many indications that the study and collection of Folk-lore is now engaging the attention of most countries in Europe make it necessary that this Society, being the first to introduce a systematic study of Folk-lore, should as far as possible work in unison and confederation with similar organizations abroad, and should draw within its membership foreign scholars and students.’1

This quote is from the annual report, published on 2 June 1886, of the Folklore Society—one of the earliest professional associations in the discipline of folklore studies (known in German-speaking regions today as Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, Europäische Ethnologie, or Kulturanthropologie). At the time, ‘folklore studies’ mainly meant the study of ‘the people’s’ customs, fairy tales, legends, oral traditions, and so on—although its disciplinary boundaries were not yet strict, but were still shifting. The quote refers to an aspect of the history of the discipline that has thus far received little attention: the transnational activities of actors and institutions. Although the institutionalization of the discipline, was often in close step with national and even National Socialist aspirations, the question arises as to how this development was related to the global and imperial interests that equally characterized this period. Was there also activity across national borders in the early phases of the discipline? And if so, what were the impacts of its successes and failures?

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  1. ‘The Folk-Lore Society: Eighth Annual Report of the Council. 2nd June, 1886’, Folk-Lore Journal, 4/4 (1886), 369–74, at 369. []

Sketching Conceptual History’s ‘Janus Face’: Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Löwith

While a student at Heidelberg University between 1947 and 1948, Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) sketched a curious self-portrait. Drawn as part of his archaeology course, Koselleck sketched himself lying vertically, head down and feet up, under the surface of the earth, shovelling through layers of sediment in pursuit of artefacts with which to document a human past.1 A talented caricaturist, Koselleck’s self-portrait is not alone in his collection. Alongside this sit sketches of his teachers: a fringe coterie of philosophers, including Karl Löwith (1897–1973), who left an indelible imprint on Koselleck’s intellectual world as a student.

Self-portrait by Reinhardt Koselleck.
Reinhart Koselleck, Self-Portrait as an Archaeologist, reproduced from Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck (Bielefeld, 1983), 4 . Reinhart Koselleck, Ende einer Moritat bei Professor Wahle, Selbstdarstellung als Frühhistoriker, 1947, 27.5 x 40.5 cm, ©Erbengemeinschaft Reinhart Koselleck.

Peculiarly, when interviewed by Christof Dipper in 1998, Koselleck cited his theoretical commitment to a panoply of figures at Heidelberg, including Otto Brunner and Carl Schmitt, but made no mention of Löwith.2 Nonetheless, the intellectual lineage is self-evident; their pedagogical relationship clear. As a student, Koselleck co-translated portions of Meaning in History; he wrote the foreword to Löwith’s autobiography; and in 1967, he published ‘Historia Magistra Vitae’, the draft for his lexicographical article ‘Geschichte/Historie’, in a Festschrift for Löwith.3 Critical scholarship on the Koselleck–Löwith connection has thus far placed a thematic focus on the premise of a secularized eschatology and a historiographical focus on Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise (1954).4 This blog post will demonstrate, however, that Löwith’s influence on Koselleck is not limited to Kritik und Krise , nor indeed the premise of a secularized eschatology, but rather underpins Koselleck’s principles of Begriffsgeschichte (‘conceptual history’), as formulated within the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (‘Basic Historical Concepts’).  

Continue reading Sketching Conceptual History’s ‘Janus Face’: Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Löwith
  1. Some of Koselleck’s drawings have been published in Katharina Koselleck and Ruppe Koselleck (eds.), Vorbilder—Nachbilder: Gezeichnet von Reinhart Koselleck (Bielefeld, 1983). The drawings depict, among other things, teachers and friends from Heidelberg University, and scenes and impressions from German and international politics from 1947 until 1980. []
  2. Christof Dipper, ‘Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte: Reinhart Koselleck im Gespräch mit Christof Dipper’, Neue Politische Literatur, 43 (1998), 187–205, at 187. []
  3. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte’, in Hermann Braun and Manfred Riedel (eds.), Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1967), 196–219. []
  4. See for instance Hans Joas, ‘Die Kontingenz der Säkularisierung: Überlegungen zum Problem der Säkularisierung im Werk Reinhart Kosellecks’, in Hans Joas and Peter Vogt, Begriffene Geschichte: Beiträge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks (Berlin, 2011), 319–39. []

‘More a denial than a safeguard of rights’: Law, Politics, and Constitutional Discussions in Mandatory Palestine

In the autumn of 1930, a long memorandum landed on the desk of Lord Frederick Lugard, the British representative to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. It had been sent by Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, with whom Lugard was in close contact over the affairs of Palestine, then a British mandate. At the time, Weizmann was working intensively to mitigate the implications of the statement of policy by the British Government, the ‘Passfield White Paper’, published in October of that year. This statement, which came about following reports on the causes of inter-communal violence in the summer of 1929 and the conditions of land available for settlement and development in Palestine, confirmed the government’s intention to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases. It also reaffirmed its plan to establish self-governing institutions in Palestine, as stipulated in the Mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations in the summer of 1922.1

Continue reading ‘More a denial than a safeguard of rights’: Law, Politics, and Constitutional Discussions in Mandatory Palestine
  1. ‘Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1930, 3692, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, at [https://palestinianmandate.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/cm-3692.pdf], accessed 14 Nov. 2024. []

European Integration Re-Woven: British and West German Textile Employers’ Associations and European Integration, 1958–1980

Despite being famous for a skyline dotted with cranes and modern developments, a journey to Manchester is also a journey back in time. Once known for the role the city, and the textiles at the heart of it, played in the industrial revolution, Greater Manchester still has many remnants from days of past industrial glory. The derelict cotton mills and warehouses, for instance, which can be spotted on the twenty-minute train journey from Manchester Piccadilly to Bolton. Horrockses is one such remnant—a textile company with a history of nearly 200 years and a fashion line once so coveted that even Queen Elizabeth wore Horrockses dresses during her tour of the Commonwealth in the 1950s.1 Bolton, once an important town for textile production, also commemorates its history with statues of personalities such as Samuel Crompton (born in Bolton and inventor of the spinning mule), who revolutionized the industrial production of textiles.

Continue reading European Integration Re-Woven: British and West German Textile Employers’ Associations and European Integration, 1958–1980
  1. Horrockses, Crewsdon & Co, Preston. Lancashire City Council Archive, accessed 5 Nov. 2024. []

Human Interest in the Global South: The Gemini News Service (1967–2002)

As a metaphor, Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ has seen better days.1 During optimistic times, it succinctly conveyed the image of an ever more closely connected world in which people separated by vast distances could easily have a chat, as if across the garden fence or at the local pub. Nowadays, however, it is described at best as a pastoral front for enduring colonial power structures in the global media system, and at worst as inspired by colonial warfare.2 Yet during the second half of the twentieth century, the villages of the world were central to journalistic projects that sought to change the colonial structure of the global media system.

Continue reading Human Interest in the Global South: The Gemini News Service (1967–2002)
  1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, reprint (Cambridge, MA and London, 1994 [1964]), 34. []
  2. See Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (Minneapolis, MN, 2018). []

(De)Constructing Europe? Some Findings . . .

Bringing together nine researchers based in Hamburg, London, Rome, and Warsaw, the (De)Constructing Europe project (also known as the ‘Euroscepticism project’), sought to view the history of European integration through different lenses. Challenging and moving beyond what some, such as Mark Gilbert, have termed the ‘progressive narrative’, whereby the European Union is portrayed as inexorably heading towards closer integration, the project sought to cast light on alternative viewpoints and underappreciated actors.

Continue reading (De)Constructing Europe? Some Findings . . .