Baring Brothers and the Cuban Plantation Economy, 1814–1870

Abstract

Historians of the North Atlantic have shown how its economic system mobilised great effort and resources to produce, distribute, and sell commodities such as sugar. This activity helped to weave a trading and financial network which, from the sixteenth century onward, increasingly enmeshed the eastern American ports with European consumers and African enclaves on the Atlantic.¹ Sugar economies and planters required the ready availability of credit; merchant banking houses in Europe and the US provided the financial link between local exporters and their markets throughout the world. The House of Baring emerged as one of the premier entrepreneurial firms on either side of the Atlantic, and was among the first to act on the idea of establishing a permanent transatlantic organisation.² By the first decade of the nineteenth century Barings was one of the leading Anglo-American houses providing financial services to sugar merchants, which soon became an important part of its business. This importance drove Barings’ involvement in the wealthy Spanish Caribbean colony of Cuba, which, after the collapse of Saint-Domingue, had become the world’s greatest sugar producer, at a time when rising demand in European markets seemed unstoppable. Thus, Barings stands out among the creators of the intricate circuit of commerce, money, and capital flows which shaped a single transatlantic economy.