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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. []