Abstract

"Froth, Fraud, and the Creation of New Financial Markets: 'The Count of Monte Ciprico' in the Anglo-American Brewery Syndication Craze, 1888-1891"

Robert Kaminski, University of Florida (robert.p.kaminski@gmail.com)

Between 1888 and 1891 a wave of twenty-four American brewery syndicates hit the London market for £18,924,000. Historians such as Mary O’Sullivan have shown that these flotations headlined a pivotal moment in America’s financial development—helping create a market in industrial securities as well as the financial and legal infrastructure undergirding it. Famous corporate promoters such as London’s H. Osborne O’Hagan and New York’s Samuel Untermyer rightly play a central role in these narratives. Nevertheless, historians’ focus on these successful promoters has obscured the role of brewery owners, other manufacturing proprietors, the press, and “every impecunious hop agent in the country…emulate[ing] the example of Col. Mulberry Sellers” with visionary financial schemes co-creating America’s market in industrial securities. Creating this market meant not only developing the financial and legal innovations needed to link local and regional businesses with global financial systems but also coming to grips with the froth and fraud that attended the introduction of new financial technologies.
This essay will use the career of the failed actor and would-be corporate promoter George Ciprico as a lens into this process. “The Count of Monte Ciprico” enjoyed a “meteoric career,” offering generous bids for breweries and getting options on “mills by the double handful.” Yet none of these deals would be consummated—Ciprico lacked both the financial backing and the legal knowledge he claimed—and he would briefly be jailed as a suspicious character despite retaining the loyalty of many credible business partners. Though exceptionally colorful, the tragedian-financier’s career dramatized the froth and fraud accompanying local and regional proprietors’ and the press’s learning process as they sought to understand the financial and legal mechanisms involved in bringing industrial securities to global markets before their routinization.