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- Jasper Jolly, ‘Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery’, The Guardian, 18 June 2020. [↩]
- The Baring Archive, London (BA), A4, ‘Louisiana Purchase Papers’ (1803–66). [↩]
- Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, ‘Vincent Nolte: Global Player and Bankrupt Entrepreneur, 1779–1856’, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German–American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. [↩]