Of the 31 millionaire British merchant bankers who died between 1809 and 1839, 24 were Jewish.
(Jews)THE SIXTH GREAT POWER A History of One of the Greatest of All Banking Families, the House of Barings, 1762-1929. By Philip Ziegler. Illustrated. 430 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.
Surely Philip Ziegler is right in calling Barings of London ''one of the greatest'' of banking families; arguably he could have written ''the greatest.'' (His title, ''The Sixth Great Power,'' alludes to Cardinal Richelieu's 1818 statement: ''There are six great powers in Europe: England, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia and the Baring Brothers.'') Founded in 1762 as John and Francis Baring & Company, and originally serving principally as London agent for the Baring family's wool-and-dye business in Exeter, it had the luck to begin life at the time of the great rise of international merchant banking, and Francis Baring in particular had the astuteness to see the vast possibilities there. Even before 1800 the House of Barings was already a leading force in the City of London, and Francis was sitting in Parliament.
Of the 31 millionaire British merchant bankers who died between 1809 and 1839, Mr. Ziegler tells us, 24 were Jewish. The Barings were not; as descendants of low-church North German Protestants they were from the first an anomaly in their field. Mr. Ziegler consciously risks being called anti-Semitic merely for making much of this, but clearly he has good historical reason to do so, because in the context the Barings' non-Jewishness was one of the most striking facts about them, and their outspoken rivalry during the 19th century with the Jewish Rothschilds was all but the defining fact about them.
The Barings were seldom accused of being brilliant in society. The original Francis was spoken of as ''the mama'' of his family because he was so fond of ordering the children's clothes and fussing over the nursery. ''We had a dull dinner at Lady Ashburton's,'' William Makepeace Thackeray once complained. ''A party of Barings, chiefly.'' (On a subliminal level, it probably didn't help matters that ''Baring'' sounds so much like ''boring.'') In their early years the Barings profited largely from joint ventures that they were able to get into with the well-established Dutch firm of Hope & Company. Even before the formation of the United States, the Barings were prescient enough to establish themselves on this side of the Atlantic, and they soon came to be the foreign bankers most trusted by the United States Government. Between 1865 and 1890, they were the source of more than a quarter of all American railroad stock issued in London - a principal source of funds for our railroads during that period.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/23/books/books-business-never-a-black-sheep-baring.html#
