Banking

Abstract

In the period when Latin American countries in the early 1800s were struggling for independence from Spain and Portugal, British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh realized that Britain’s real interests were bound up not with acquiring territory in the region but in trade with, and investment in, independent republics. Canning and Palmerston followed the same policy of promoting these nations’ independence and avoiding any intervention by European powers in the conflicts that broke out.

[British immigrants] came from a country in which improved farming and stock breeding were already widely practised, where commerce was an old and respected avocation, and merchants were long familiar with trade to distant lands. [Moreover,] a developed stock market and a vigorous, if unstable, banking system were further proofs of its economic maturity.

—David Joslin, 1963