"Foreign Consignees of Specie Imports in Antebellum New Orleans, 1839-1862"

New Orleans was a central location for the specie market in the early American republic, attracting specie flows primarily from ports in the Gulf of Mexico. A dataset assembled from the New Orleans Price-Current identifies consignees for $68.72 million in specie imports (64.7% of the total) from 1839 to 1862. Out of 36 top-tier specie consignees who imported $48.4 million (45.6% of the total), I found that the fifteen foreign importers in my sample received 23.3% of specie imports, a share that exceeds the combined amounts of thirteen American importers (12.4%) and eight banking and financial entities (9.93%). This paper examines some factors explaining foreign consignees’ dominance of the New Orleans specie market. Foreign specie importers operated in the interstices of state-nations, did not leave behind cohesive archives, and have gone mostly unnoticed in the business and financial histories of the antebellum South and the mid-nineteenth century Atlantic economy. Spanish, German, Irish, British and French consignees integrated into stable networks of family, kinship, nationality, ethnicity, and business occupations. They combined entrepreneurial activities as commission merchants, commodity factors and dealers, financiers, and real estate investors, pursuing sophisticated profit-making and investment diversification strategies. Most were involved in international trade and financial intermediation, leveraging New Orleans’ strategic location to import manufactured goods from Europe and the US North and export cotton, sugar, and other commodities from the US South, Mexico, and Cuba.