Abstract

"Investment standards in an imperial world: the case of the United States during Reconstruction"

Christoph Nitschke, University of Stuttgart (cgnitschke@gmail.com)

The 1860s & 70s saw various nation-making processes globally, including Italy, the United States, Germany, & Japan. One priority for these incipient nation states was access to international financial markets for the financing of public debt, the adjustment of currency regimes, or the employment of investment capital for industry. These countries constructed newly capacious treasuries, instituted new currencies, & restructured their banking systems. I argue that this political-economic process, perhaps better understood as “financial reconstruction”, also included the conscious cultural signaling of creditworthiness in the international sphere.

Using the case of the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction era in the 1860s and 70s, this paper traces networks and informal partnerships between Treasury agents, private bankers, foreign representatives, businessmen, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. It interrogates financial and diplomatic correspondence, newspaper articles, and cultural representations, filtered through the boom years 1870-72, about the non-financial factors of supposed creditworthiness in the first era of globalization. What boxes did contemporaries think their new nation and free-labor economy needed to check to attract the interest and confidence of investors? This paper hypothesizes that Americans & their European partners operated with broad assumptions about the standards to which their associated investment opportunities were held. These standards of economic development might have prescribed a gold currency, but also revealed a laundry list of other factors, some of which were increasingly being cast into supposedly quantifiable frameworks, while others remained intangible. Contemporaries communicated visions of reliability and growth in racialized and gendered categories of credit: national unity, territorial integrity and expansion, political stability and predictability, central state power, property rights, technological advancement, transportation infrastructure, resource extraction, global commercial connections, and, not least, racial composition and strength of ‘character’, were all touched upon.