The Age of the Atlantic Revolutions saw the decline of Amsterdam as the centre of the early modern global payments system, to be replaced by London. Drawing on hitherto undisclosed archival sources, this paper employs the case study of the financing of the Louisiana cession to compare how two prominent international banking houses, Hope & Co. of Amsterdam and Francis Baring & Co. of London, structured international payments in the Age of Revolutions to shed a light on migration of the centre of the global payments system from Amsterdam to London in the early nineteenth century.
The historiography represents the Atlantic Revolutions as a catastrophe for Amsterdam as a centre of the global payments system. Prolonged war and economic crisis severed Amsterdam’s financial relations with longstanding creditor states and overseas markets. The suspension of remittances and the dearth of new business paralysed Amsterdam credit networks so that by the end of the Napoleonic wars, about a third of Amsterdam houses had liquidated and another third had migrated abroad. The remaining houses re-oriented towards the continent and the colonial market.
Amsterdam’s decline came at London’s benefit. The Royal Navy’s blockade of the continent presented British houses with a near monopoly on transatlantic finance, and as financier of the anti-Revolutionary coalition, British bankers muscled in on markets that were traditionally served by Amsterdam houses. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, London was established as centre of the global payments system.
This paper examines the migration of the global payments system from Amsterdam to London through the prism of the largest financial operation of the early nineteenth century, the financial operation to facilitate the transfer of political authority over the Louisiana territory from France to the United States. Drawing on the archives of Baring and the archives of Hope this paper first reconstructs the financial operations that were developed in Amsterdam and London, second it conceptualises Dutch and British approaches to global payments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and finally it compares Dutch and British approaches to global payments to contribute to the understanding of the migration of the centre of global payments from Amsterdam to London.
The paper argues that Dutch credit networks were more resilient than often believed, and that, whilst the centre of global payments system did migrate to London, in part this was because British houses adopted Dutch practices to international payments.
Mark Hay read history in Amsterdam, Paris and Oxford. He obtained his doctorate from King’s College London, with a study on how Dutch merchant-bankers navigated the troubled times of the Atlantic Revolutions. Currently, Mark is Assistant Professor in History at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has recently published a monograph with Palgrave, entitled: “Transatlantic Finance in the Age of Revolutions: Hope, Baring, and the Financing of the Sale and Purchase of Louisiana”. His broader research explores the European political economy, 1775-1825, with a focus on Dutch credit networks and Napoleonic war financing.
