“Who Hold the Balance of the World?” Bankers at the Congress of Vienna, and in International History

Abstract

By the early nineteenth century, the contingencies of more than two decades of continental wars had reinforced the indispensability of bankers and their networks to European governments. In a period when the term “international” was itself relatively new, bankers were historical agents in a new era of international politics and finance. The bankers, and their families, who gathered around the great congresses established by the statesmen of Europe to negotiate peace at the end of the Napoleonic Wars connect the political and economic strands of that international past. From the Congress of Vienna to the Congress of Verona (1814–1822), conventions of sociability offered bankers opportunities to expand and exploit diplomatic and commercial networks, and to advocate for humanitarian causes—Jewish rights in some cases, and Greek independence in others. This essay contributes to new histories of capitalism by restoring economic actors to the shifting transnational landscape of modern politics. In this history, bankers cultivated the norms that came to characterize the liberal tenets of a new international order, from the evolving language and practices of humanitarianism to the burgeoning market for nation-building sovereign debt.