Thesis (doctoral) - Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-147).

This dissertation explores a crucial period in the monetary geography of the Atlantic economy by examining the market for gold and silver coins (specie) in New Orleans between the Panic of 1839 and the U.S. naval blockade of the Confederate port in 1861. Situated at the intersection of global financial history and U.S. economic and business history, the dissertation reconstructs New Orleans’ supply chain of precious metals, shedding light on the port’s strategic role linking mining regions to specie-scarce nations under international bimetallism, and reveals how commission merchants, cotton factors, and merchant banks’ agents relied on metallic liquidity to engage in international trade and financial intermediation during a crucial era for nation-building and economic development in the Americas. The dissertation employs three main research strategies: (1) statistical and geographic analyses of a novel specie imports dataset (the first of its kind in the scholarly literature on specie in the early U.S. economy), extracted from the New Orleans Price-Current, a semi-weekly business newspaper, (2) group profiles and social network analysis of specie importers, leveraging multi-archival research and case studies of individuals, families, and banking and financial entities, (3) historical statistics on U.S. specie imports and Mexican specie production and exports. Chapter 1 reveals New Orleans’ centrality in the antebellum U.S. specie market and its strategic position in securing and shipping specie for the Atlantic economy under international bimetallism. Chapter 2 examines the demand side of the New Orleans specie market by focusing on the port’s cosmopolitan community of specie importers. Foreign residents received more specie than U.S. importers and New Orleans banks combined. The Louisiana Creole commission merchant and cotton factor Edmond Jean Forstall was the market’s key arbitrageur. Importers sorted into “silver barons” and “gold princes:” foreign residents handled mostly Mexican silver, while English residents, Anglo-Americans, and New Orleans banks obtained primarily gold. Chapter 3 focuses on the production and exports of Mexican specie to New Orleans. The port’s commission merchants exported British, Western European, and U.S. goods to Mexico in exchange for pesos (dollars); they reshipped U.S. cotton and Mexican pesos to European markets demanding specie for currency arbitrage operations in Europe and trade with China. Although New Orleans rapidly obtained metallic liquidity amid episodes of financial distress such as the Panic of 1857, its specie supply chain was highly vulnerable to disruptions from geopolitical shocks such as the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the U.S. Civil War.

This dissertation explores debt as an instrument of control deployed by German private and state actors in the Ottoman Empire between the 1870s and 1919. The everyday functioning of empire relies on seemingly abstract and smooth financial transactions across vast territories. Studying these processes architecturally foregrounds the material reality of the “immaterial” system of modern finance, revealing the frictions it creates, and thereby centers how power is produced and subverted within and across imperial borders. Focusing largely on Deutsche Bank’s archives and related sources, “The Architecture of German Capitalist Imperialism” traces the movement of German capital into Ottoman territory. The corresponding material system—from financial office buildings in Constantinople to farms, factories and trading posts in the Ottoman region of Cilicia—served to enable Deutsche Bank, a private German bank with significant state support, to carry out its business in a foreign, non-colonized territory. In the Ottoman capital, the Deutsche Bank branch office and the headquarters of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA, founded by international creditors following the Ottoman government’s 1875 declaration of bankruptcy) constituted the central structures of the debt system. Yet to increase agricultural tax revenue—thus helping to repay foreign debt and serving as collateral for new loans—the OPDA operationalized a system of resource extraction across a wide economic geography, reaching far into the Anatolian provinces. As a major creditor of the Ottoman government, Deutsche Bank was central to this OPDA project while also developing its own agricultural cotton program in the Anatolian countryside. What emerged, as this dissertation demonstrates, was a vast inter-imperial architectural network engendered by, and servicing, Ottoman debt. To understand how that debt operated on the ground, the study follows the flows of capital through the more informal spaces that mostly go unacknowledged in both architectural and economic history—such as a local banker’s private villa in Cilicia and warehouse facilities at Deutsche Bank’s cotton factory—and explores the land regime the Germans encountered in the Ottoman countryside. It shows that financial transactions required physical translation and transformation, which generated dependencies for Deutsche Bank from local actors, thus undermining the bank’s dominance particularly in the “hinterland” and slowing down the German Empire’s imperial push. By focusing on the multifaceted built environment of capitalist imperialism, this dissertation challenges well-established boundaries of rural and urban, private and imperial, metropole and colony and establishes architecture as both a medium and a product of the logics of modern finance developed in the late nineteenth century. Directing attention to the material foundations of imperial finance illuminates the functioning of global capitalism at its founding moment, throwing long shadows into the twentieth century.

In this study of the development of the sugar, rubber, and cotton industries in Brazil, the writer proposes to show the development of these industries from the beginning of the industries to about 1947.