Intermediation and Gatekeeping in International Finance, 1830-1914

This panel explores how the informational and interpersonal infrastructures of finance created opportunities for intermediation and gatekeeping in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent works in the history and sociology of finance have explored the material infrastructures and technologies that allowed for the emergence and expansion of international finance alongside the tools of empire building, state formation, and capitalism. The three papers in this panel aim to contribute to this bourgeoning scholarship by addressing the non-material dimensions of international finance. The elusive divide between the public and the private spheres and the informational and interpersonal infrastructures of finance created and/or constrained, in different ways, the possibilities for intermediation and gatekeeping, further consolidating and/or challenging hierarchies of power, knowledge, and status. The papers trace 1) how debates about the private and public roles of the East India company in India posed obstacles to the participation of Indian businessmen and entrepreneurs in the emergent life insurance industry in the 1830s and 1840s, 2) how the constitution of spaces of sociability mediated the intersection of politics and finance in mid-nineteenth-century London and offered well-positioned actors a comparative advantage as venues of reputation building, and 3) how the consolidation of financial writers as producers of expectations of the future for mass consumption in the early twentieth century was key in disseminating strategies of discounting the future as proxies for sovereign credibility.