A Profile of a 'Gentlemanl Capitalist': Shirle Jenks's Business Interests in Colombia
Cain and Hopkins famously categorised the “gentlemanly capitalist” social class as having been the driving force behind British economic imperialism. This group linked to London finance maintained a “gentlemanly” existence in the home counties through the maintenance of the lifestyle of the traditional landed gentry. Cain and Hopkins provided an overriding framework for the analysis of British imperial economic activity, but little work has been done at the micro-level to analyse the lives of such “gentlemanly capitalists” which leaves unanswered questions.
This paper addresses such questions through a micro business history of the interests of one such “gentlemanly capitalist”, who in the first few decades of the twentieth century built a significant portfolio of business interests in Colombia, including railways, river navigation, utilities, beer and processed food manufacturing, and the Colombian sovereign debt. These interests were mainly organised in London as free-standing companies, and his combined influence over the Colombian economy was enough to make him a topic of intense scrutiny in the contemporary national press.
The project is founded on Shirley Jenks’s personal archive which has only recently been discovered and made available for historical study. Jenks went through bankruptcy proceedings related to his Colombian holdings, meaning that bankruptcy hearing minutes which detail his holdings in minute detail have been preserved, as well as much of his personal correspondence which discusses his business dealings, personal life and motivations for investment in Latin America. This is the first such study of profiling the life and business dealings of a “gentlemanly capitalist” in such detail, and it aims to test the hypothesis put forward by Cain and Hopkins qualitatively from the perspective of a micro-business history
