• DOI:10.1086/711314
• Corpus ID: 226968343

Old Regime in a New World: Frankfurt’s Financial Market in the Nineteenth Century*

@article{Hein2020OldRI,
  title={Old Regime in a New World: Frankfurt’s Financial Market in the Nineteenth Century*},
  author={Benjamin Hein},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={2020},
  volume={92},
  pages={735 - 773}
}

• Benjamin Hein
• Published 16 November 2020
• History, Economics
• The Journal of Modern History

During the final third of the nineteenth century, German-speaking central Europe emerged as one of the leading creditors of US governments and corporations. London, Amsterdam, and New York played a key part in channeling German capital to North America, but so did—rather improbably—the small mercantile city of Frankfurt am Main. This article revisits Frankfurt’s rise as a major financial center in the Atlantic World. It explores why and how a city of such modest size, and with little prior experience in Atlantic World finance, became one of the central players in the international market for American debt after 1860. To do so, the article looks beyond transatlantic kinship ties to Wall Street, often cited as key to Frankfurt’s success, to zoom in on the city itself, opening up the black box that is the Frankfurt securities market. This close-up examination reveals, first, how Frankfurters institutionalized anticompetitive market practices and nontransparency in unique ways during the early nineteenth century. Second, it demonstrates how, more by happenstance than by design, these institutions subsequently came to play an integral role in European investors’ struggles with budding American capitalists over financial hegemony in North America. Retold in this way, the story of Frankfurt’s nineteenth-century financial markets reveals how Europe’s Old Regime capitalism was, to use Charles Maier’s term, “recast” and made operable for the modern age.